Blogger in the Classroom

(I really wish that Katy ISD would let students use Blogger in the classroom---hint hint)

 I have had a blog for quite some time. It is useful to be able to direct students to a blog post to be able to direct them to any data, videos, or media you would like them to view. It is also useful for posting daily assignments if you are not using a LMS. I used to do this quite a bit in the last district I worked. Here is an example of a screen shot showing directions of how to sign up to use Poster My Wall, a website I often use for digital poster creation.

How a 7th grade girl takes a 1 1/2 hour final exam

Greetings! As many of you know, this is my first year to teach middle school, therefore, my first experience with middle school final exams. Middle School is a different life altogether, made up of strange and wonderful 12, 13, and 14 year olds. The male version coats itself in Axe, runs around and punches people, and makes farting noises repeatedly. This I understand since I raised two of these. It's the girls I don't quite get yet. Excerpts from real, final exam taking experiences from the past two days: 8:30--Enter classroom. Hug all other girls in class since they are your "BFF's". Hug teacher and say "I love this class". Sigh loudly and ask when this class period will be over. Pick up copy of final exam. 8:35--Sigh loudly and dramatically whine "This is too hard." "I can't do this". "This is stupid". Mention that you think the teacher's sweater is cute. Mention that you think the teacher's hair is ugly. Ask what time we get out of this class. 8:45--Do not work on final opting to Google One Direction. Sigh loudly when told to work on final. In a dramatic voice state "You are so mean to me". When told by the teacher that you will be moved to another chair state that it is against the law and you will call an attorney (no really--I had that happen this morning). 9:00--Braid your hair. Unbraid your hair. Braid it again. Poke the neighbor next to you and ask if she thinks your hair is cute. Google hairstyles. Sigh repeatedly when told to work on final exam. Tell teacher to "Chill because we have PLENTY of time to finish the final". 9:05--Put on lip gloss, attempt to paint nails and accuse teacher of being mean when she takes the nail polish away (nope--had that one happen this morning too). Repeatedly ask to see the counselor due to emotional trauma of having your nail polish taken away. When request is denied, loudly exclaim "You are so mean". 9:15--Begin working on final. Complain that you don't possibly have enough time to do all this. Whine that you are hungry. Ask to use the restroom. Ask when this class is over. Mention that this is your least favorite class. Stamp foot on ground in frustration when the teacher won't "Help" you on the final. Put head down on desk. 9:30--Really work on the final. Race through questions, calling the answers out and asking "does anyone know number 10?" Ask how many minutes we have left. Ask if you can use the restroom. Ask what you want for Christmas. Sharpen pencil. After being reminded that the final is on the computer and doesn't require a pencil say dramatically "I KNOW" and roll your eyes. 9:45--15 minute warning is given. Everyone is finished but you. Loudly complain that the teacher is unfair. Stamp feet. 10:00--Bell rings. When told by teacher that you are not leaving until you submit your work, cry. 10:05--Final submitted. On way out door, draw a smiley face on the board. Middle School is so fun.....

Weird Kids

For a long time I have wanted to write a blog post about weird kids. Growing up, I was a weird kid. My family moved around a lot and I was always kind of an outlier. I look back and realize I was Sue Heck (for those of you that watch The Middle). Always optimistic, but just goofy. Also, my place to hang out in high school was the Science Resource Center. No, really.

So last year at school I met, sort of, Weird Girl. We all know Weird Girl; every school has one. My particular Weird Girl spent the early morning before school started walking around the halls not really talking or interacting with anyone. I always saw her and said hello, but she never said hello back. Sometimes she almost smiled, though. I kind of worried about Weird Girl not having any friends so I always made it a point to LOOK for her everyday and by the end of the year she was actually making eye contact. this year, I didn't see her the first few weeks--then I realized why. Weird Girl has friends! She found her place in the vastness of our 3000 student high school. Today, I saw her walking home with 3 other people, talking, laughing--it was awesome to see.

Weird Girl was replaced this year by Weird Boy. Weird Boy spends his early mornings sitting on the end of a bench outside my hallway reading a book by himself. One day I stopped and asked Weird Boy what he was reading and he almost jumped out of his skin. Guess no one had asked him that before. Last week I began to notice--Weird Boy is sharing his bench with others, who all sit and silently read books. They have found a home and each other. They have found their place.

We are all looking for our "place" in the world. Maybe it is just a bench of like minded people, but it is a "place". Help somebody find their "place". Maybe you'll make friend in the process! But please, public schools, KEEP those programs that ALLOW all us to find our true place. Fine Arts, Career Prep, and Computer classes are always on the chopping block. If not for them, I wouldn't have found my "place" :)

Module 5-Choices and Creation

I admit I read this one and felt the brain juices begin to flow. I am excited about creating CHOICES for students, especially in projects. What interests one student does not interest another. I tried to keep this in mind when I wrote my capstone project for Digital Media last year. See an example at http://dimm1.wikispaces.com Of course, with this project I was trying to assess ALL of the different softwares I had taught last year, so it was easy to find something for everyone. But looking back at it, I see that I really didn't give them a lot of creative license in how they completed the project. In fact, I was pretty darn specific, down to the order that everything needed to be in. So I am now working at retooling that one for this year. Sigh. I am a control freak and a rules follower. Choices will not be easy.

I think the main issue with giving choices on how students demonstrate the skills we are assessing (that is the point-right?) just boils down to plain old TIME. Okay, time is a valuable commodity that seems to be scarce in my life right now. It is so much easier to give ONE choice because that means there is ONE right way to do it! Maybe. But not right. And certainly not right for every student. Also, there is a certain amount of pressure towards "standarization" of, well EVERYTHING rather than differentiation. I admit I am blessed that I do not teach a core subject and am therefore allowed a few more liberties than my English and Math teaching peers.

I have just struggled through two days of Power Point presentations with a group of 11th and 12th graders. I say "struggled" becaue they all know the mechanics behind a Power Point presentation at this point, but few of them actually give GOOD presentations. Why? Do we give them TOO MUCH guidance--or not enough? I agree that a teacher must allow students the ability to express themselves by giving them choices so that all types of learners will benefit--but that seems to often backfire as the students I teach are not USED to having to think on their own. It is so frustrating to have students scared or unwilling to exhbit any sort of creativity because they have LEARNED that that is not what is expected in our overly standardized environment.

So the grand experiment will be...a project giving CHOICES of how it is completed to my Global Business class at the end of this chapter on..Worldwide Political Systems :) Still under constructiion-I will report back with an update and let you know how it goes!

Module 4-Receive, Read, Respond

This week's topic focused on Contribution and Collaboration in group projects, shortened to "Receive, Read, and Respond". It is important for our students participating in global projects to understand this. I have had many students in my five experiences with FCP's disappointed because they felt they were the "only ones" doing any work. Don't we, as teachers, become upset when we feel that no one is responding to us in the classroom? Receiving and Reading is not enough. The response is critical to the collaboration process.

Many times the fault lies with the student. There is always that "overachiever" student who goes in, does a lot of initial work, but doesn't feel the need to accept any criticism or do any actual collaboration. These are the students used to "doing all the work themselves" through learned experiences with group projects in the past. These are also usually the students highly concerned about their grade on the project over all else. These are the students who, when they discover that someone has come and editted their work and made changes, will come complain to their teacher that "someone has gone in and completely ruined the project". Also-there is the reverse. This is the student, through learned experiences with group projects, who sits back and LETS everyone else do all the work. These are the ones who don't respond, since they fell like their opinions won't ultimately matter or someone else will just pick up the slack.

Sometimes the fault lies with the teacher. Sorry guys, I will pick on you. There is always a teacher or two in the project who just doesn't "get" the project. They are more focused on the research and knowledge aspect of the project than on learning collaboration and Web 2.o skills. These are the teachers who will encourage their students NOT to collaborate, because they are convinced the REST of the teachers don't "get" that this is a research project and the collaboration come second to the topic learning. Also-we have the teachers who are 3-4 weeks behind everyone else and are then upset when they feel work has gone on without their classes. this is where shared calendars and timelines become very, very important.

I will share a couple of interesting stories that have happened while my classes have been working on wiki collaboration projects. Last year, when I asked for reflections after a Flat Classroom project had been completed, I had several students mention that they were very surprised at the motivation level of some of their peers at other schools. "Ms. Clayton-these kids actually CARED about doing a good job and learning something" one said. The attitude rubbed off on some of my students; unfortunately, some of my students still thought these "other kids" were a little crazy. Note that I did this project in a classroom of kid who were mostly low level learners from who little had been expected before. Hmm. There is a lesson there.

The second also happened in the same classroom with a girl who found out that another student she was working with, who was now living in the Middle East, had spent some time living in Houston. They discussed The Galleria, a high end shopping mall, that the student living in the Middle East dearly missed. These two students decided to collaborate with each other on the end of project video by providing outsourcing clips of each other at a shopping mall in their respective cities. Because they had bonded, they collaborated without anyone pushing them!

Challenges this week were to participate in a group wiki project, and to also assess. I have each class I teach work on wikis form the beginning so that when we do collaboration projects, they are already very familiar with the process.

Here is my very first effort http://whswega.wikispaces.com which was a wiki dictionary of vocabulary needed for the Digiteen project. Here is an example of a class wiki for one of my "Rock Band" capstone projects for Digital Media last year http://dimm1.wikispaces.com . Here is one currrently in process for my Global Business Class http://whsglobalbiz.wikispaces.com I have come a long way with these! Students seem to have no problem grasping the concept of a wiki and why we use them. However, I did have a current student, when asked to add new content to her wiki this week, ask if she was supposed to erase all of the old work. No, I explained, we add to it all year and then we have one BIG project at the end. You mean-she asked-can I go back and change stuff I didn't understand at first but now I do? YES! Smiles.

As for assessing--boy, this has been a tough one for me. I HATE assessing wikis. The rubrics have helped. But here is till the "if you tell them they must write 250 word they will write 249 words" issue--it almost represents a paradigm shift in grading that unfortunately the rest of my colleagues have not yet caught up with and kids don't quite buy into. any ideas would be great!

The Family Tree Assignment

Sometimes the best assignments are created by accident. Global Business is a new class for me this year. We were studying a chaper on culture, and how our nuclear and extended family shapes the values and beliefs that are then extended into the business environment. Kind of as a "what should we do today" assignment I asked all my students to create family trees going back to their grandparents. I asked them to include education and occupations of their relatives, and also asked them to write a paragraph sharing a "story" that had been passed down in their family.

Several of my students didn't seem to know how to begin. A few came up and talked to me in private. "Ms. Clayton-I don't know my father" one began. Another shared "I haven't had any contact with my mother since I was 2-can I put my stepmother?" I calmed some nerves, and told them to include as much as they knew, and told them the point wasn't to make anyone uncomfortable--it was to show there was no "typical family" unit. I also gave them the weekend to go home and ask their family questions.

The real surprise came when it was time to present the projects to the class. I shared mine first. I mentioned I had an aunt that had been married 7 times and all of her children had different fathers. I saw several heads nod. They understood this.

A girl I was call "A" stood up to begin. "This is my Uncle Buttface. No one knows his real name. Everyone calls him Uncle Buttface. This is my aunt. She is a prostitute and on drugs. This is my other uncle. My dad said to write his occupation down as "mooch". Trust me--this girl was not trying to be funny. This was her real family. She closed with "there are some people in my family I am not proud of. But they are still my family and I want to talk about them."

It was awesome she went first. Hands waved in the air to talk. Even my shyest students spoke. Here are some priceless excerpts:

"I never knew until this project that my grandfather wrote poetry. He wrote me a poem when I was a baby before he died. My mother found it and gave it to me. It made me cry"--JT

"My parents met when they both worked at Old San Francisco Steakhouse as waiters. A cool thing about my family is three of my aunts were the girls that rode on the swing and rang the bells. My whole family was sad when they tore it down and built a Target"--ES

"I don't know who my dad is--I have never met him. That makes me sad but when I told my mom I wanted to know his name for this project she told it to me. That is the first time I heard his first name is the same as mine. It makes me feel I know him even though I don't."--HA

"I am from China and my parents were only allowed to have one child-me. Some relatives told my parents to give me away because I was a girl but they didn't-I am so happy they liked girls as well as boys"--XW

" None of the people on my mothers side of the family have gone to college. There is a lot of pressure on me because of that. I hope I will make my family proud."--DN

"My grandfather was a train engineer. He died 10 years ago. Now, when anyone in the family sees a train they honk their car horn to remember my grandfather"--MG

How priceless, and what a wonderful experience for both my students and their families. Talk to your children. Share your family stories, even if they aren't pretty. It is what makes us all unique.

Module 3

So my homework this week is to reflect on Digital Citizenship. For this one I want to share my personal expereince in working with 9th graders (age 14) in a Digiteen project several years ago. I will quote them "Why are we even learning this? It is all common sense." Hence, the difference between a digital citizen, or one who has grown up with access to technology, and a digital immigrant, or a person my age who has "immigrated" to the world of the internet. Or how about my mother in law, age 80, who still believes EVERY e-mail she gets from Nigeria is legitimate. I don't think she is even an immigrant yet.

I see 2 year olds playing with I-Pads in restaurants now and some of the fasting growing software programs are targeted to preschoolers! However, the same group of kids that claimed "this is all common sense" fell for the "Dihydrogen Monoxide" website scam page and even clicked to order t-shirts and send money! I use this assignment to prove to kids that not everything you read on the internet is true and you have to KNOW who you are talking to.

While I was involved in the Digiteen project, our school had a Facebook "scare" where a student posted a message on somone elses FB page that a bomb was going to be set off. The school took this very seriously, especially since it had been posted from--get this--a computer teacher's class through a proxy (we don't have access to FB in our school district--but every kids knows how to access it anyway). Parents were very concerned and we had the FBI at our school for two days investigating. That SAME WEEK a student in my class who was involved in the Digiteen project found another classmates Ning page open and typed "Sebastian is a homo" on that student's Ning page. It made me angry, but it was a teachable moment. Our so called digital citizens, tech savvy students, still don't always behave in a responsible manner.

Our district has mandatory "internet security" training for each student, but it involves our principal reading a script over the announcements and having them take home a handout about internet security. This is a start, but not enough. We must teach responsible digital citizenship from very young.

I resolve to: continue to teach responsible digital citizenship, even when my high school students who "know everything" claim it is "all common sense" :)