Summarizing v. Reflection

Heres a Tweet that came @learnteachtech this afternoon from @PaulV8:

@learnteachtech might you have anything to stress the difference between summary and reflection?my #avid students don't get it.

In the AVID classroom, where I'm lucky enough to guide middle school students, we talk a ton about reflection. We also do a fair amount of summarizing.

One summarizing activity that we do is GIST (its in the Tutorial Strategies book). Basically, we take a topic and sum it up in 20 words after the activity or discussion. It can also be a good discussion starter to do the GIST first. The 20 words can be Wordle like (just words) or a couple of sentences.

I also have them write Tweets (w/o computers) on notecards. They get 140 characters. I like GIST and Tweets because it's short but complex to get a main idea into a few words.

Summarizing is main ideas. What is the point? What was it about?

Reflection is thinking about what happened. What did you do well? What specifically did you learn? How did your group operate? What could the teacher have done better? Where did your group go wrong? If you could change the activity, what would you do?

I've talked about meta-cognition in AVID: thinking about thinking. I tell my students that adults, especially teachers, do this all the time. We don't leave a training without spending a few minutes thinking about the learning and what we take away from it, how it could be better, or what the best part was. I tell them that feedback for the instructor is important. What can you tell me that would make me a better teacher. They seem to enjoy telling me what I could do better.

Reflection v. Summarizing. Two very specific things. My one piece of advice: give starters for each or give guiding questions for each. Students will eventually figure it out.

Google Voice Homework

I don't think I've ever posted a detailed lesson plan on my blog, but I can't think of another way to show how I'm using Google Voice in the classroom.

[A note on Google Voice: You can't just sign up. You have to request access. I got an invite within a week. I don't have invites to give away, they don't do that.]
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Lesson Plan: AVID Interviews

Objective: To have students become fluent in the use of rubrics and continue demonstrating mastery of higher level questions (Costa) and higher level answers.

Essential Question: How can you answer a higher level question without directly stating the question in the answer?

Activity: Interview yourself (this is our first interview project) using the AVID interview questions. Write out your 5-10 second answer on your paper as if you were talking. Follow the rubric to ensure that you are doing it correctly. When you've answered the questions, practice your answers out loud with a partner to make sure you aren't just reading.

[In class, we listened to the interview that I recorded on Google Voice. They were very harsh graders. They told me that it didn't sound like I had practiced. But, they did a good job with the rubric.]

The homework is to call my Google Voice, record their interview answers and hang up. I told them that can call anytime because it won't ring any of my phones, it will go directly to the voice mail. They thought it would be fun to call at 3:00 in the morning. I gave them until 8:00 am on Monday to record.
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One other note, some students said they don't have access to a phone. I told them that they could use any phone (cell, land line, pay phone, library phone or school phone) and if they couldn't find a phone, I'd set them up at school on Monday.

Our follow-up to this will be to listen to select inteviews with permission in class and use the rubric to score each other. Once that is done, we'll do another interview with a partner that will be recorded to Google Voice.

It would be great to pull cell phones into the is conversation. If I could have them partner up with someone with a cell phone on speaker phone, we could record right in the classroom. That would be awesome. We could also use it on our college visits to quickly interview students on campus about college. That would be awesome.

The last thing I want to say is that the technology is not the focus. Our end product could easily have been presenting in class or videotaping the final answers. The focus is on the writing, questioning, and rubrics. I hope that the technology makes it more interesting but I know they are learning the questioning, rubrics and writing through the process.

Okay, that's a bit of a rambling post, but, hopefully, it will give my faithful readers an idea about Google Voice in the classroom.

Google Voice in the Classroom

I recently got my invite to Google Voice and created a number for my classroom. I got in early enough to have my number related to my subject: 612-xyz-AVID (2843). (The xyz isn't real, just don't want to get flooded.) The next thing I did was call my number from my school phone and leave a message.

Then I went to Google Voice and saw my message. There it was, transcribed into text on my screen. The transcription wasn't perfect but that might have to do with the fact that I mumble. In addition, to seeing the text, I could click a button and listen to the message. There are options to email the message or embed the message in a web page. Here's an example of a message from one of my AVID tutors:



Pretty cool.

In the classroom, I have several ideas. One idea is to use Google Voice to complete the AVID interviews that I need to complete. Students will complete the interview answers in class working with a partner. Then they will go home, call into Google Voice and record their own answers. After it is recorded, I'll email it back to the students with the embed code. They will embed the recording into their portfolio site.

The beauty of using Google Voice is that almost everyone has a phone of some sort, cell or other wise. An unintended benefit is that I have a record of some sort of phone number for those students who leave messages. That's huge!

Some other ideas that I have are to show this to the autism, speech, DCD staff. They can use it for so many things.

What are your thoughts?

It's The Kids! OR 17 Ways to Build Relationships in the Classroom

Fellow blogger, Teach Paperless, wrote a post about ISTE and the current voting that is happening to see who will keynote the conference next year.

This quote from Shelley, at Teach Paperless, sums it all up:

I want the real thing. I want students to stand up there on stage and give us the low-down.

Then this article, Success Starts With Strong Relationships, from Edutopia, about tough love and relationships in school came up in my RSS right after Shelley's post.

I realized it's all about the kids and the relationships that we have with them. Whether isn't knowing your student's names or checking in on them in other classes or eating lunch with them. They are people and they crave relationships.

Today, I had a post-conference meeting for the observation that I had last week. The mentor informed me that 8 of my 25 students were in the room working on the warm-up activity while I was at the end of the hallway greeting students before class started. Eight students coming in and working without being told! Relationships lead to motivation (motivation is a different blog post).

What do I do to build relationships?

• We play document camera boggle to increase vocabulary. I cheat. I'll admit that. I rig the letters so that there are words that I want to focus on in class.
• I routinely applaud (literally clapping) my students for the hard work during class.
• I do random drawings for pencils and other small prizes.
• I make activities relevant to them. We just did a small unit on designing, understanding, and using rubrics. We wrote rubrics on "Great Halloweens" to understand the concepts.
• I shake hands.
• I say hi.
• I say bye at bus duty in the afternoon.
• I listen.
• I let them be off task as long as its a great discussion.
• I laugh at and with my students.
• I do my best to not yell.
• I let them find solutions to their own problems.
• I try to not kick students out.
• We play games together.
• We work together.
• I do the work they do.
• We treat each other with respect.
  

Am I perfect. No. On a five point scale of exemplary teaching, I scored roughly 3.7 by a mentor that I respect and challenge.

So, what's the bottom line? Build community and relationships in your classroom with your students because it will lead to better teaching and learning.

Blocking, Filtering, and Possibilitites

I'm frustrated with my school and my district.

My frustration with the district lies in blocked sites:

• Twitter
• Vimeo
• You Tube
• iTunes Radio

And those are just the sites that I'd like to use on a regular basis, not sites that appear on searches that have something I could use. I understand the need to block bandwidth hogging sites like Pandora and iTunes Radio. However, why can't we give access to everyone, at least teachers, for video sites and professional development sites that will help educate our children?

My frustration with my school lies in parental controls in place. There is a list of about 30 sites that students have access to. The best part is that Google search is blocked. Let me repeat that. Google search is blocked. Now, I understand that there are other search engines out there. Those should be taught. The world uses Google and students should be taught how to use Google search effectively.

The biggest problem is that any sites that teachers want students to use are blocked. Teachers have go through our tech person or our media specialist to add sites to the student accounts. So, when I tried to let students use Edmodo in my room, they couldn't. Its a perfect educational tool but it was blocked because it wasn't being used in the media class. Talk about a way to ruin a lesson plan.

Here's my biggest frustration: our school can differentiate teacher accounts and student accounts. However, at at district level, teachers and students are treated the same. That's right, our teachers have the same trust level at a district level that our students do. We can't fire students. We can fire teachers if they can't handle the ability to use Twitter and You Tube.

It can't be that hard to give different access levels to different types of people.

And this gets me to possibilities. What would my teaching look like if I was able to use Twitter, Vimeo, You Tube, iTunes Radio and other search results? Would I be a better teacher? Would I have a bigger impact on my studentss? Would my students be better writers. I might never know.

Education Minnesota and My Local School Board Member

MEA weekend is actually Education Minnesota's yearly conference and workshop that happens two days in October every year.

Tom Madden is a school board member and chair person for the Minneapolis Public Schools.

I've got my thoughts, especially with all the talk of test scores, NCLB, AYP and teacher performance.

What are your thoughts?

The Cost of Curriculum

I've been cc'd on an email discussion over the past few days regarding curriculum content in the Minneapolis Public Schools and how technology impacts the decision making. [Thanks to @sabier for the inclusion]

The gist of the emails is that teacher created content is more powerful and relevant for our students than traditional text book curriculum from a major publisher. One of the emails mentioned the cost. Since the mention of cost, I've been thinking about it over lunch, prep, dinner and during meetings.

What is the cost of curriculum? The only experience I have with buying textbooks is in college. I paid between $75-$200 per class for textbooks (1994-1998, private liberal arts college in southern Minnesota). I would hope that K-12 schools and districts are buying in bulk and are at the lower end of that spectrum. For this argument, let's assume $50 per text book. This doesn't include time spent selecting and managing curriculum.

In my school in 7th and 8th grade, not every student has a text book of their own. There is a class set that is shared between 2 classes. Okay, some math (for @pepepacha):

$50 per book
4 subjects
35 students
2 grade levels

=$14,000

In elementary, this figure is even greater, not to mention the consumables that the elementary folk go through.

How much would it cost to have teachers creating their own content? That's tough. Is it an extra prep period each day? Is it a week long retreat in the summer? Is it ongoing meetings? Not really sure.

But, the other cost is how students access information. A netbook can be had for $200 in the general public. Districts could probably get steep bulk discounts. So for this argument, let's say $150. (Or go with an OLPC in bulk for just over $100)

$150 per netbook
140 students (7/8 only)

= $21,000

Replacement for both textbooks and netbooks would be 3 years.

So for $4000 more dollars, you can have more current and relevant curriculum in a delievery that is more engaging then a textbook. Plus it can be upgraded yearly and is something that teachers have ownership in. That's a huge plus.

[I know that I'm neglecting training, fixing/upkeep, and many other things. I'm also assuming that teachers are willing to use the technology. There are tons of assumptions in this argument. We force teachers to use textbooks, why not force them to use technology? That's probably a whole different post.]