Bio Poem
Web Site Evaluations
Graphic Organizer
Integrated Technology Activities (see Lesson Plan)
Lesson Plan Cover Page
Lesson Plan
Video Book Trailer
Friday, August 9, 2013
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Silicon Brainiacs with children in Waldorf Schools
This is the article I mentioned in discussion the other day, that Liz said her husband had also cited:
Grading the Digital School: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn't Compute
Grading the Digital School: A Silicon Valley School That Doesn't Compute
Web Site Evaluations
Category: Student Resource
Audience: students
Grade Level: 4-12
Subject: Reading
This story-based online learning site provides primary sources as it leads students through the topic or event. Subjects include Famous Trials, Disasters, Philosophies, History, and Current Events. Click on The Black Death to sample this amazing online journey, complete with linked Table of Contents chapters, maps, famous paintings--or try the Visual Vocabulary from the popular book The Help.
Writing Fix
Category: Teacher Resources
Audience: Teachers (primarily), with interactive available for students
Grade Level: K-12
Subject Area: Writing
This is truly a site for “all things writing,” from prompts to poetry to mentor texts to inservice lessons. Teacher lesson samples are everywhere on this site, with extensive emphasis on popular children’s books; there are even pages on Photo prompts to inspire writing. Sponsored by the Northern Nevada Writing Project, here is something for teachers of every grade, K-12.
Category: Teacher Lesson Plans
Audience: Teachers
Grade Level: K-Adult
Subject Area: Lesson planning
Teachers can watch videos of entire lessons, then delve deeper into Lesson Components. Pages include resources for teachers that align with lessons viewed. Six major content disciplines are available to peruse.
Category: Student Interactive Learning
Audience: Students
Grade Level: Middle and High School
Subject: Reading
Students can read about current events, take the Daily News Quiz, comment directly to the NYTimes, enter student contests, discuss daily poetry selection, investigate any one of 16 different news categories. Not limited to students; this is a wonderful teacher-student cooperative website.
Category: Student Interactive Learning
Audience: Students; seems to especially intrigue ELLs and SPED students
Grade Level: Grade 3-9
Subject: Reading
Make class teams and amass grains of rice by answering questions in several categories. Correct answers raise level of difficulty; students love the challenge of keeping their “level” high. Switching categories can be done at any time; rice totals are determined by session activity. (If you create an account, scores are saved.) Great for Friday afternoons, as a free time “reward” site, or for the day before vacation begins.
Category: Student Resources
Audience: Students
Grade Level: 4-12
Subject: Reading
Concise biographies of primarily contemporary figures; includes children’s authors alongside pop culture and music personalities. Interface is clean, not overwhelmed with ads. Additional print and media resources are listed for each; readers may comment.
Category: Student Resources
Audience: Students
Grade Level: 4-12
Subject: Reading
Truly, an encyclopedia-on-a-page. From vocabulary to quotes to current events to search engines to the yellow pages to links to international news sources...what isn’t available on this page? Colin Powell once deemed this his number one favorite site. For years, my browser has been set to open refdesk automatically when I turn on my computer. I could not begin the day without reading my customized Auto News Feed list and sharing with students.
Category: Student Interactive Learning
Audience: students
Grade Level: (primarily) Grade 4-college
Subject: Reading and Writing
Powered by Drexel University and a consortium of colleges and universities, this site invites students to search by discipline, but includes interactive pages (see “Procrastinator” for Teens) for student-submitted writing. Search results are reliable websites. Staff “favorite” collections are available on several topics. For example, one collection provides links to the websites of museums around the world. Direct links are also suggested to popular news sources, magazines, and instructions for writing . The “Stately Knowledge” is a wonderful link for upper elementary/middle school students doing research projects on the United States. Link options “For Kids” and “For Teens” are clearly delineated. Parent and Teacher resources as well.
Category: Teacher Lesson Plans
Audience: teachers
Grade Level: K-12
Subject: Reading and Writing
Lesson plans for “real life” units, offered by age range (5-10, 11-13, and 14-18); by number of lessons you want the unit to span; by emphasis (collaboration, critical thinking, organization, or creativity). Each lesson includes worksheets to print as well as ways to help students use online tools (ex. using online thesaurus).
Category: Teacher Resource
Audience: ESL Teachers
Grade Level: 6-12
Subject: all
Larry Ferlazzo offers a long list of “Best Resources for [almost every possible subject]” websites, compiled by topic. He blogs about his choices and reviews, and teachers can sign up for his daily emails. He has published several well-known books about motivating students. Although he claims to focus on ELLs, most of his recommendations could be used with all students.
Because teachers today are often expected to teach coping skills in addition to everything else, the following *bonus* website may be a welcome addition to a cyber library. Maybe we can find a way to slow things down a bit when we use the Internet!
Category: Student Interactive Learning
Audience: Everyone
Grade Level: All ages
Subject: Listening
See what happens if you “disobey” the directive to do nothing by touching your mouse. Great activity for recentering on a difficult class day, or for students who are struggling with a personal challenge. Perhaps once daily after lunch would be the perfect application.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
In-Class Portfolio: Graphic Organizer
This is the graphic organizer
for my middle school students' Daily Word Journal.
Complex Texts
The last paragraph of this article summarizes the thesis and makes a strong statement. Do you agree or disagree and why?
I could not agree more that “unwired, unplugged, and unconnected learning” needs to be protected.
Technology--educational or personal--is already deeply embedded into our daily lives. I do not believe a significant number of people suggest we go backwards (this author--Bauerlein--included). However, it is incumbent upon the “elders” (teachers!) of the tribe to be models of best practice, and that means modeling the benefits of slow, deliberate study, much the same way the Slow Food movement has evolved. It’s a question of quality of study, their future, and their health; we have statistics that many struggling teens are sleep deprived because they are using technology until the wee hours. Sleep deprivation is a possible cause of aggression and a major cause of inattention. Therefore, I’ll make the leap and suggest the addictive nature of technology contributes to an inability to understand complex text. I can say with some certainty that the frenetic activity of online games and social networking did not exist a couple of decades ago, and you’d be hard-pressed to find major articles from that time focusing on teens staying up until 3:00 a.m. So...yes, I’m making the connection that the easy and never-ending availability of cyber “connections” has contributed in large part to fragmenting many students’ attention and rendering them unready for the rigors of advanced study.
Many schools seem reluctant to create and maintain expectations for students unless those expectations mirror-or mimic--the technologies of student extracurricular life. I believe our culture is doomed, unless, as Bauerlein indicates, we find a way to slow learning, and convey to young people that their egos and opinions hold only so much sway--that there are writings critical to our existence as a democracy that require our careful attention and thorough comprehension and that stand apart from us personally. There is value in learning not to expect every piece of information to entertain us in some People-magazine sort of way. If we fail to convey this lesson to students, if study and learning is seen as bouncing around to sample a plethora of resources simply because they are brief and available, we will not be graduating students who are college-ready.
Tuesday, August 6, 2013
Our Brains Extended (Prensky)
How could we rethink our K-12 curriculum for the 21st century, symbiotically combining human strengths with the most powerful technology strengths?
The need for a complete remake of curriculum is the strongest of Prensky’s proposals. “Real life skills”--planning companies, communities, housing, “improving public health, the water [and food] supply,” creating budgets, amortizing, using databases--should be a core focus. I would rather see that Effective Action symbiosis in place of current standards.
For the remainder of his proposals, a symbiotic relationship is difficult to envision.
According to his Effective Thinking, students would be “creating and analyzing their own surveys of worldwide student opinion on current topics.” There is no evidence that this kind of exercise--compiled exclusively by individuals with limited experience in every aspect of life--is a way to really “learn” those higher order thinking skills. Great start, great practice--but limited. He hasn’t proven a symbiosis with the human ability of teachers to build foundational skills for effective thinking. There absolutely needs to be a counterbalance to narcissism--which could now be considered rampant on the Internet.
The focus of his Effective Relationships, that technology would not be “producing people who know more, but on producing people who relate better” confounds me. Absent hard data on this, I cannot suppress the nagging thought that several civilizations--including ours--have historically ”produced people” (what a mechanical, chilling, Orwellian phrase) who are not only highly literate, but relate extraordinarily well to others. They did both out of necessity, and out of adherence to their moral codes. And they did it with limited technology. I firmly believe technology is making people less able to relate well to one another.
Portfolio assessment is logical for Effective Accomplishment, but the brag that “every student’s content knowledge would differ” should not be the standard. As a civilization and culture, if we are to exist, we require a shared foundational content knowledge of some wide scope. Technology could assist in fostering that. Of course our avocations and hobbies dictate that we will all have deeper knowledge of certain subjects beyond a core. Prensky suggests that technology offers something original in that regard, but that’s the way life has always been.
Change is constant and will happen with or without Prensky. Perhaps technology will place a more serious focus on a symbiosis with “real life” learning. And just maybe his shocking proposals are the only way to realize even a modicum of effective reform.
Monday, August 5, 2013
Ab's Technology Autobiography
If most of you want to ensure a high level of comprehension while reading the first half of this, think: your grandmother. That should help...
While my sister would argue that the two of us standing in awe of a wealthy relative's--and the neighborhood's first--color TV would hands down illustrate the technological watershed of the 1960s, for me it was the first sighting of the IBM Selectric typewriter in my father's office.
In fact, it was with great reluctance that I gave mine away five years ago when the kids left and I sold the big house. I'm not sure any technology has spawned the same rush I felt at sitting in front of that piece of machinery. However, technological wonders since then have arrived at such a fast and furious pace, it's no longer a leisurely process of establishing a relationship with just one (sort of like online dating).
Anyway...the Selectric (with the changeable little silver "font ball" you see here) was a favorite piece of equipment for several years. Then I got married and took a job as the assistant to a Deputy Commissioner at a state agency in Boston. One morning shortly after I was hired, I arrived at work to find the other 11 assistants buzzing with excitement (and some fear) over the new IBM Memory Writer. It had a SCREEN so you could see the document while you typed--and it saved it all! Who would've thought?
Since no one had the first clue how to use it, yours truly stepped up and wrote A Manual for Assistants. I had a blast. Oh...and of course I bought one of those nifty IBMs for home. Shortly thereafter, IBM "standalones"--PCs in wheeled cabinets--arrived at the workplace, but the wheels didn't last long. Everyone ended up with one on their desk. The screen was small, but that wasn't the worst part; it was the annoying monster green-colored text. At some point a mustardy yellow text became an option, but suffice to say, graphics had a long way to go.
My enthusiasm for all this clunky (but wonderfully fascinating, and modern) machinery plus my degree in education propelled me into a job in the same agency teaching hundreds of employees how to read and send email, do word processing, create simple spreadsheets--all within the "Office Automation" department, as it was called at the time. (For those of you following the timeline, we're into the late 1980s.) Soon I became completely engrossed with a rather different piece of equipment: a Samsung cell phone that flipped open.
I used it constantly during the year I got my Ed.M., distracted only by the laptop I saw a student (1 out of 100) using to take notes during a lecture. It took me several years of frustration with Windows before I finally admitted Apple had it right, but since I switched I've been all in. I depend exclusively on my iPhone 4; no land line anymore. I'm on my second MacBook Pro (first was stolen), and love my iPad2. I use my Nano when I walk. My family calls me "Gadget Girl" and they humor me. None of them are as fascinated with all of this as I am.
It balances out, I guess. All family and friends now at least have Smartphones of one make/model or another. All are into social networking--except me, because I find that outrageously boring. The closest I get is LinkedIn and an unused Twitter account. Yes, we play Words with Friends and other games, but they get boring too. However, if you waved a new iPhone or Apple TV under my nose, I'd be there. I love looking up news sites and researching esoteric bits of info and texting and emailing and shopping online and putting my stuff for school and students in Google Docs and keeping my grocery list in Notes because it saves paper and (reluctantly) downloading a few e-books because they are so convenient when you go on vacation and paying bills online is fast and omg, I could never, ever live without the Evernote app but Notability
may be running a close second because it's so amazingly easy to take notes and send them anywhere and you can even record the lecture if you get tired and hooking up my iPad to my dvd player and watching movies streamed from Netflix on full screen is the best. Phew! Now, if I could only get my landlord to mount my 54" flat screen TV on the wall....
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