LJW23Things

As I was reading some of the posts on the Successful Teaching blog, I came across a link to WritingFix, a website that has writing prompts, lesson plans, and resources.  A lot of the lesson plans are based on children’s books and/or songs and videos found on the web.  The lesson plans also tell how each lesson relates to 6+1 Traits of Writing.  One of the lesson plan that I reall like is titled “With Your Own Two Hands.”  During this lesson, students listen to the songs “With My Own Two Hands” by Ben Harper and “Waiting on the World to Change” by John Mayer, and they watch two videos.  There are a couple of graphic organizers provided for students to brainstorm and then write their own poem on how they would change the world.

I tried out Quizlet, a site on which you can create flashcards to help you (or your students) study vocabulary.  On quizlet, you type in the vocab words and definitions.  You also have the option to add images from Flickr.  When you have typed in all of your vocab, you can then use the flashcards to study, test yourself, or play some simplistic (definitely not elaborate) games.  Teachers can create flashcards for their students to use to study vocab or students can create their own flashcards and look for pictures that represent the words.  Students can create and join groups to study with each other.  The only problems may be that anybody creating flashcards has to have an email address and must be 13 years of age.

I created flashcards for Freak the Mighty Chapters 1-4 and added images to the flashcards.

On the K12 Online Conference 2009 site, I viewed a session titled “Using Web 2.0 Tools to Teach ‘The Outsiders.’”  I chose to view this session because The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton is one of the novels we have our students read in 7th grade.  Last year, our librarian created a WebQuest for our students to learn about the author, but I would like to include more Web 2.0 tools in the teaching of the book this coming school year. 

In this session, the presenter demonstrates how he used Stupeflix, Google Maps, and Google Streetview as he taught the book to his students.  Using Stupeflix (similar to Animoto), he had his students create slideshows of images that would represent what greasers, the social gang a group of the characters were involved in, would have looked like.

In the book, two of the greasers were involved in a murder in self-defense and ran away.  The presenter had his students look at a map on Google Maps and find a town that the characters could have run away to in one night.  He then had them switch to Google Streetview and look at what the rout would have actually looked like.  He had the students take notes of what they would have seen along the way.  The students then wrote a story from of the characters point of view describing the run away experience.  The presenter was working with some reluctant learners who ended up writing much more in response to their prompt because they were able to use the Google tools to see what the characters in the book would have seen.

I will definitely use these ideas to teach The Outsiders and other stories/books this coming school year.  My students love looking at Google Maps and Streetview but I had not thought of  a way to incorporate the maps into a lesson.  This is a great idea!

I do like the online anytime delivery style of professional development.  It allows teachers to see just the presentations we want to see instead of being stuck in a presentation that you don’t like.  I have been to several teaching conferences where you choose what sessions to attend based on titles and maybe a brief one sentence description and then end up disappointed because the session was not what you had hoped.  Online sessions give you the freedom to close the session if you start watching and realize it’s not what you expected.  Plus sites like K12 Online Conference are free.  The conferences that teachers are often sent to are so expensive and there’s no guarantee the info will prove to be useful in the classroom.

I created a slideshow using Slide.com and images from Flickr.  The slideshow contains the vocab words for the first four chapters of Freak the Mighty which is the first novel we are suppose to read.  It was really easy putting it all together.  The hardest part was having to choose from all of the pictures and the style and background I wanted to use.  One caution:  as I was saving pictures from Flickr, there were a few of them that were .gif files not JPeg files.  So, I had to save them differently so that I could open them as a JPeg because slide.com was not wanting to load them as .gif files.  Slide.com also allows you to choose music to put with the slideshow.  I didn’t spend a lot of time searching through all of the songs available, but I did include music on this one just to see how it all works.

As I was reading through some blogs this past week, I came across some examples of visual vocabulary.  Then, as I was reading the task for Thing 11 there was a link to the Teacher Dude blog about Teaching Vocabulary Using Flickr.  So, I decided to look for pictures on Flickr that will go with the vocabulary words for the first novel we are suppose to be teaching with our 7th grade LA students.

One of the vocab words is phony.  Below is the picture I have chosen for phony.

Picture by Steven DePolo courtesy of Flickr http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevendepolo/40025427

As I was searching for the pictures of the 8 vocab words for the first four chapters of Freak the Mighty, I had to search under many synonyms for the vocab words to find pictures that I like.  It was fun looking around in Flickr.  Flickr is something that I will probably use a lot to create PowerPoints, vocab slide shows, etc. for my classroom; however, it is not a site I would encourage students to use in my classroom because there were a lot of inappropriate pictures that came up as results.  Anybody can pretty much post any pictures they want to, so no matter how innocent the search may seem, you never know what pictures people may post and include under the tag you are searching for. 

Creative Commons is great!  Having free access to millions of pictures that people are offering up for anybody to use makes finding images to use much easier.  I have found pictures to use for all of the vocab for the first 4 chapters and will be putting those into a slideshow using Slide.com at some point this week.

I created my wiki.  This would definitely be easier to have my students use than a blog because you type directly on the page vs having to click to add a new post etc. 

Blogs seem to be a better use for larger groups of info that need to be more organized into seperate pages.

Wikis are better to use with groups of people so that everyone can respond on the same page.

There are several sites I’ve found this week while reading through my reader, but there are two today that I can definitely see myself using in my classroom.  I thought I’d pass these on to all of you in case you are interested.

Sweet Search – This is a search engine that has 35,000 sites that have been viewed and approved for student use.  There are also pages for specific grade levels and subjects as well as teacher links for lesson ideas.

Literacyhead – This is a site that connects art to literacy.  There are many pictures and lesson ideas to use to teach reading, writing, visual vocabulary, graphic organizers, etc. with art.

I had not noticed the CC logo on things until I started completing the 23 Things each week and I didn’t know what it meant until I watched the two videos.  Creative Commons is great both professionally and personally.  Traditional copyrights limit so much of what can be used and the time and hassle it would take to track down the people who own the copyrights is just not worth it especially during everyday tasks.  I do use digital images, audio, and video clips in my teaching.  CC gives people much more freedom to add their creativity to things that have already been created.  Many students have trouble thinking of places to begin or ideas for projects, but when they see ideas from other classmates and on the internet, those pictures, stories, etc. spark new ideas in the students who then develop great final products.  Students will still have to learn how to properly use copyrighted material, but not having all material completely restricted will provide some relief.  It will be essential to teach students the difference between copyrighted material and CC material and appropriate use and documentation for all material.

The 1001 Flat World Tales Project  is great!  I looked through some of the stories written by students from Korea, Hawaii, and Colorado (example: A Ghostly Encounter ).  The students had some great writing, but what makes the wiki format fantastic is that students from the seperate states and countries were giving each other good feed on their stories.  There is a list of questions that the students use to help them think about the story and give feedback.  There were compliments and constructive critism where students gave each other ideas on how to improve the writing without being rude.

I would love to use wikis in my classroom for student writing, editing, and revising.  It is so hard to get around to every student to give a lot of feedback as they are writing.  Part of our TEKS also include students evaluating their peers work, so wikis are great to address those TEKS and to help students get more feedback on their writing. 

The Room 15 Wiki  gives me some ideas of things to have my students do next year.  This wiki includes a page for students to recommend books as well as help pages for assignments and homework.  I would like to include a book recommendation page and a homework help page where students can put links and ask each other questions that relate to their classwork and homework.  There would definitely be some perameters but it would be interesting to see what students will do with it.

The Greetings from the World wiki is a great opportunity for students to record information about their states and countries and post them all in one place for other students to read and explore them.  I loved that the students used Glogs to put their information together and then put all of the Glogs together on one page for people to view.  The Louisiana page  includes a Glog created by a teacher/administrator that has all of the student Glogs pasted on it.

I would also like to have my students use wikis to colaborate on group projects.  Having all of their information recorded in one place will allow them access from any location that has internet access and will allow me to see how they are progressing without having to ask students to show me their folders etc.

Wikis are also great for teachers to find out what is going on in other classrooms.  Looking at these wikis gives all of us ideas.  We are capable of creating assignments for our students that are of this quality that the teachers we work with need to see to give them the confidence that they can do this as well.

I added Seventh Grade English, Weblogg-ed , and Moving at the Speed of Creativity to my reader as well as Flash Puzzle Zone just for fun.  Two of the best articles I have read so far are “Yeah, You’ve Got Problems. So Solve Them.” from Weblogged and “The Timer” from Seventh Grade English.   

“Yeah, You’ve Got Problems…” is an article encouraging teachers who tend to immediately find the problem with something new to look for a solution instead of just giving up.  I enjoyed reading this article because it puts into print how I often feel dealing with some teachers I work with who seem to search for a problem just so that they have an excuse to give up and not try anything new.

“The Timer” is about an English teachers experience with projecting a timer on the screen for every activity his students do to keep them on track and the sounds he chooses when the timer goes off.  The sounds scare his students and have made some of them fall out of their chairs.  Having a timer going for every activity sounds like a great idea that I will try next year.  I have a timer in my room and use it often, but it will be much better to have one on my computer to project on the screen so that everybody can see it clearly and know when they’re running out of time.  Plus changing the sounds will keep them on their toes.

It’s been great checking out the updates on my reader.  I’ve gotten better at scanning through things quickly and have eliminated some blogs that I originally included in my reader.  I have taken advantage of starring things that might be interesting and reading them later when I have more time.