How Easy is Easy Enough?

I remember hearing something about the company Palm. Back when palm pilots were all the rage (yep, I had one) I read that there was a real concern at about how many clicks it would take to do a task. Any more than 3 clicks, and the company considered it a problem. I think this kind of thinking needs to be employed in schools as they incorporate technology. In this particular instance I am thinking about parents.

It's for the We use SharePoint websites for our classroom websites in our district. They are incredibly powerful and incredibly useful. Our district is always working at making them look better, and more user friendly. I think one of the ways we could start using our homework site is to set up our publicly viewable homework sites so that parents can rss them to their smartphones. This would mean that whenever a teacher posted their homework to their class website, parents would get it in their inbox on their iPhone, blackberry, or HTC. Any smartphone could do this. So can an iPod touch. I checked.

You don't need to have a smart phone or iPod to subscribe to a website by rss. You can do it on your computer. However I think of the power of a parent who can just pull their phone out of their pocket and say "Hey don't you have math homework today, page 197 #1-15?" Middle school students mean well, but there is a lot going on, and I want to make it easier to support them.

Yes, a parent could find my homework site. They just go to my district site, click on school sites, click on my middle school, click on staff directory, click on staff, and then click on my homework site link, and then click on Homework Calendar. That's a lot of clicks. If they are savvy computer users, they would bookmark the site. Too many clicks to do on a regular basis.

Parents might not make regular use of my homework site then.

Better just to send all my parents the rss feed link at the start of the year at parent orientation night, and walk them through putting it on their phone. I see parents using their phones all the time. They have them on their person and they are comfortable using them.

Let's make it easier for the parents to support their kids' learning at home. It might mean I don't have to chase down so many missing and late assignments.

Making Authentic Assignments

My marks are in, my students feel like they are done. Problem - they keep showing up to class. The year isn't done, and while I am not likely at this point to change a lot of student marks, I feel as though teachers must still hold the possibility of low marks over kids like some sword of damocles . Instead I have said at the beginning of the class that this final assignment is not for marks. At least once a class someone asks me "is this for marks?" I reply that not everything is for marks, but everything in this class is worth learning.

Some students are making animations using new software that I am unfamiliar with. I know just enough to get started with Flip Boom animatior classic, but not enough to really teach it well. So I decided to crowd-source it , and have kids teach me how it works and how it doesn't.

One of my students is teaching class. She is 13 and has done a lot of research on her own about advertising. She taught my class a lesson about what ads are, what goes into an ad, the layout of an ad, a rubric on how to judge if you have made a successful ad, and then prepared some examples. She walks around the class, helping others, and I come in when needed. Otherwise I sit at my desk, and keep out of the way on this one.

I am contemplating taking this a step further. I wonder if some of these kids sent their ads in to the brands they have chosen as spec ads, would any of them respond? Would they encourage my students? Would any of them pay my students for their project? What kinds of copyright would I have to sort out to make that happen? I guess I will have to keep thinking about this.

What I can say is with the year winding down, my students for the most part are still learning even though the kids are nuts for the summer weather. And that is not too bad, I say.

Changing My Marking For Better of Worse

When I began my position at Moody Middle I had kids printing out their first assignment. When I looked at the pile of paper from the first 4 of 6 blocks on the first assignment, I saw several problems.

1.) Wow, this is a lot of paper. They aren't going to keep it.

2.) Once they printed the paper off, it was not going to be easy to make changes and make corrections.

3.) Once I wrote my comments on the paper, they would only read the comments if they were negatively surprised at the mark.

So then I started using the online "hand-in bin" on my classroom sharepoint site. I would write in the comment box on the student's hand in form, which only they can read. This reduced the paper. But, there were still some problems:

1.) Students didn't read the comments unless they were negatively surprised by their marks.

2.) Students didn't make changes or corrections to their work after handing in their work, even if they knew what they needed to improve upon or correct.

Now, I mark in a couple of different ways. Sometimes I record my voice into their MS Word document as an embedded object, and the kids listen to my comments. I don't say the mark until the end. Mostly, I have just do a lot of loops around the room, and mark students with inconsistent performance first, lower achievers second, and high performers third. But, I call up my high performers to my desk for a ten second "whatchagonnado" chat at the start of the assignment, and periodically I ask them to share ideas mid assignment. Then I have other students weigh in on those ideas, so we are all on the same page.

In the first days of teaching, I have to repeat the instructions and criteria daily. I never show really good examples of completed work, or else I get 30 copies of the same example - mine. I teach the kids about how to self-assess, and stress the importance of being able to justify the mark they give themselves based on the goals of the assignment.

Marking now takes a couple days for some major assignments. Sometimes 3 days. I have just finished one of those weeks. It's tiring, but I think the fact that marking major projects has become a conversation has paid off with improved learning. And, I feel I have connected better with my students this way as I only get to know them 8 weeks at a time.

Worth it.

My ESL Strategy Worked!

Two days ago in my classroom I saw a girl in my class using the Google Translate button to translate a lesson I was teaching. She selected her home language - Korean - and then began to hover the mouse so that she could see the English translation of the Korean sentences she was reading. So not only was she learning my lesson, she was learning English as well.

I didn't know that her level of understanding of English meant that she was having difficulty understanding my lessons; she just sat there very quietly doing her best all along. So, this idea helped one student. I wonder if it will help more. But, being able to plug google translate in so easily makes it worth the small effort to add it to my lesson pages. I wonder if there are more kids using it that I don't see?

Work in Progress

It has taken a couple years, but I think one of my ideas is going to take off in our district. When talking with Aboriginal Ed teachers and youth workers over the last couple years, they have pointed out to me that the Aboriginal / First Nations populations in schools tend to have a higher-than-average incidence of problems with literacy and a higher-than-average incidence of Learning Disablities in our schools.

I also was really quite taken with the culture of oral history in the first nations peoples of BC. I thought that if we could remove the demand for so much written text, I think a lot of our first nations students would have some great stories to share. Also, our aboriginal ed teachers told me of the importance of art in the first nations communities. I think I have found a way to tell stories orally with art in our schools using technology.

Two Aboriginal Education teachers are signing up at voicethread.com for an account. They are going to then post some of their artwork, and tell the story behind it using microphones. For those of you who don't know, voicethread is kind of like a slideshow online, but one that you can narrate with a microphone, and invite other people to participate in with you by adding their narration to your story.



My goal would be to have students create a story with their artwork online, and then narrate it. This reduces the demand for written work, allows the student to tell their story in a detailed fashion, and to display their artwork to the world. They could then invite others to comment on their artwork and stories. My thought would be to have an elder or knowledgeable member of their Nation login from wherever they are in the world (Queen Charlotte Islands, Northern BC, Manitoba perhaps) and then add what they know to the story, provide missing details, or offer encouragement to these students. I will keep you posted how things progress.

Virtual Classrooms for ESL Students

You can only push a kid so fast and so hard. I teach a challenging course in my Computer Education course. With no set curriculum, I can look at what classroom teachers around the school are doing, and try to compliment that in my classroom. But what about the International Ed. students and ESL students in my courses? Czech, Hungarian, Korean, Mainland China; these kids are from all over the globe, but they are still kids like those in my classroom. When things become too difficult, when the water rises over their heads, they drown. Just like anyone else.

I have used shown my students how to use google translate. That worked well, but for many 11 year old and 12 year old students, they don't always advocate for themselves. If I don't open google translate for them, they don't consistently go there to ensure they understand the lesson.

To better help the ESL students in my class, I found a bit of code from the google translate tools page. It allows me to embed google translate into my lessons. This, plus the written detail, and screencasts or other visuals help a kid to understand what the lesson is all about. Even if I screencast in english (sorry, my Icelandic is a bit rusty) the visual example of a screencast about a lesson is very helpful.

And it is not just the students that benefit. In an informal poll of my students, grade 8 students ask their parents for help with their school work 2-5 times a week. What about ESL students? Often their parents do not know english as well as the student does. Parents are smart, and love their children, and want to help. By putting a translate button on the page, criteria, due dates, and screencasts or other visuals about the lesson, parents can look at the lesson and then support their kids learning at home.

To that end, if you would like to read this post in another language, I have put the google translate button on the right hand side of my page.

Cheers!

A votre sante !

Salut!

Kampai!

Everyone is doing the best they can

Today on the way to work I passed by a guy who is a plumber or electrician in his yellow, older model astro van. What was most noteworthy was not the guy, he was just another guy. The sign on the side of his van was also not really noteworthy either, as it was done with no graphics, and a single font, in red. Hard to read. What stood out was the fact that the van must have had a lot of equipment in the back because the rear suspension was sagging so badly, I am surprised I didn't see sparks coming off the muffler. Obviously he cannot afford or won't invest in a truck with better suspension. But he's up early, he's on the road, and he's going to do the best he can for the money you pay him.

I immediately identified with this guy.

This guy is all of us. He's got a job to do, and a heavy weight on him. Even though his ass-end is dragging, he is going to be there for you.

Everyone is doing the best they can.

Everyone? Yes everyone. Your laziest student is doing the best they can. They just believe that they can't do better, or that it is worth it to try. And that is where teachers come in. We have to get people to invest in themselves, so that someday they will have the skill sets and the belief that they can go out in the world, get what they need. And how to soldier on, even if you ass-end is dragging.