More Current Events in the Lab

I blogged earlier about what we did in the computer lab during the election season. On Tuesdays, I have both 7th & 8th Grade for computers. They had watched the swearing in ceremony and Obama’s Inaugural Speech during their first period of the day. During computer class on that day we began with the Dateline Video: Hope Change & Symbolism on Inauguration Day

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Following the presentation we had a discussion about the video and about what they felt Obama’s message was in his Inaugural Speech. We then viewed a Wordle that I had created from the text of the speech to see if the words used most frequently in the speech matched up with the feeling that they got when they watched it.

They found this very interesting and would love to use Wordle sometime themselves. We then reviewed how to write a formal letter and each of the students wrote a letter to President Obama. These are being mailed to The White House for any students that wish to send them. I was amazed at some of the students that definitely wanted their letters mailed. Most of the letters were very positive and supportive, a few were somewhat critical and most of them offered very thoughtful ideas on the items these 12-14 year olds feel are the most important things that the new President should be addressing.

January 28, 2009 Reflections No Comments on More Current Events in the Lab

Collaboration Conundrum

One of the things I have been very excited about this year were all of the different online collaborative projects I have been doing with my classes. These all involve some fun and different activities using a variety of tools and applications. The conundrum is this. My students are doing a great job completing these activities and we’re posting them online. A lot of other schools are also completing the activities and posting their projects online too. But, it feels more like the parallel play that you might see with very young children at a park rather than children playing and interacting together.

Ann Oro shared a wonderful map illustrating the collaborative projects that her students are doing this year and I loved the idea so much I am planning to put one up in my computer lab starting next week. I think it will help the students (and parents at Open House) see the connections we are trying to make around the world. Some of the projects my students are involved with have many schools participating but none that I feel we’ve connected with. So do I include these on the map as long as we’ve added to the project and the other schools have added to the project or don’t I? We’re in the project and the other schools are the in project. We’ve both posted finished activities, videos, pictures, etc. to the project but have we truly collaborated? Does there have to be a more tangible connection of some kind or is just being part of the whole project and adding to that enough?

Last year, I stumbled upon the Voices of the World wiki and loved the project and the global feel of it. I was thrilled this year when my 4th Grade class became a part of this project. This project is now one of my do I include all the other schools on the map projects. I don’t know that my students feel the connection to the other schools they way that I hoped they would or that they really understand that there are students all over the world drawing pictures and saying or singing the same thing as they are. Would putting all of the schools that have participated so far this year help them to understand?

Another of my do I include all the other schools on the map projects is the A Room With A View project. My students are doing their part. We take a picture each month and record information about the day and time the picture was taken and upload it to our wiki and to the gallery for the project. Each student also writes a paragraph about the month and what they like or don’t like about it that they post online. Once again I don’t think my students feel connected to the other schools. It’s hard to find the new pictures each month because there are a lot of schools involved. I have posted a request for a few other schools to connect with on the A Room With a View ning and may email a few participants directly next month to try to make more of a connection.  Would adding visual references for the schools help my students connect more with the other schools? Do I really add all the schools involved? Since my class is 6th graders do I only put connections with other 6th grade or 5th & 6th grade classes? Would that be missing the point of the project?

I always seem to have more questions that answers. I do know that because I’ve been thinking about this I plan to have my students spend some time looking at, listening to and commenting on the work of others involved in their collaborative projects. This is our first task in the computer lab when we’re back in school with my classes involved in the Winter Wonderland project and the Voices of the World project. As we watch and listen and comment we’ll add another string to our map as we connect our school with others around the world.

January 2, 2009 Reflections 3 Comments on Collaboration Conundrum

Cyber Bullying

Middle School has just finished up a unit on Cyber Bullying. Each of the classes watched and discussed Episode 1 of Adina’s Deck. All of the classes seemed to enjoy the videos though 6th grade seemed to like it more than the other grades which may have to do with the students in the class more than the video content. I plan to continue using this episode with 6th Grade in future years and plan to purchase other episodes for use later this year or next year with 7th and 8th grades.

After the discussions each class created a project about Cyber Bullying. 6th Grade created a 6-panel comic in Microsoft Word, 7th Grade created a Glog and 8th Grade created a short Public Service Announcement using Animoto. Most of these were completed well and taken seriously (even if their project was done in a humorous way) but it amazes me that some of the students still feel that cyber bullying is no big deal or that it’s okay if you’re just bullying your friends. When did bullying of any kind become okay?

This week Lori Drew was convicted in federal court in Los Angeles in a cyber-bullying trial. She may face 3 years in prison and a $300,000 fine. At this point she hasn’t been sentenced and I’m sure that if she is sentenced to the maximum that she will appeal so who knows what her actual sentence and/or fine will end up being. I just cannot fathom a mother making up a 16-year old boy on MySpace and lying to a teenage neighbor. How can we expect our pre-teens and teens to act appropriately when parents are doing things like this?

I hope that in addressing this issue with the Middle School students in my school that at least they will think before doing anything like this online. I do plan on following up with them in the next week or so about the conviction of Lori Drew in the hopes of reaching those who think it’s no big deal.

November 28, 2008 Reflections 3 Comments on Cyber Bullying

Current Events in the Lab

Last week was Election Week and not just any election but a Presidential Election. I took advantage of that and the free videos on BrainPop (probably won’t be free forever) and spent some time talking about elections, citizenship, voting, the Presidential Candidates and the reasons why this election was of major historical significance with all of my classes from Kindergarten through 8th Grade.

The youngest grades learned about symbols of the United States and colored pictures of symbols of the Democratic and Republican parties and other election related pictures in KidPix. The older grades learned more about the process of electing a president and the responsibilities of being a citizen and voting. Many of them also played some election games at Scholastic News Online: Election 2008 and Weekly Reader Election 2008. 7th and 8th Grade also learned about the Electoral College and how it works and created a spreadsheet model of an “electoral” breakdown of the votes at the school. Since we didn’t have states to use for this, the population of each class determined how many electoral votes that class received. Each class had 1 electoral vote for every 5 students in the class.

After the videos and introduction to the candidates, each student had the opportunity to vote for their choice for President & Vice President in our Voting Booth. The older students reviewed the candidates stand on issues as they waited to vote. Each student chose their class (which was used to calculate “electoral” votes) and then clicked on the picture of the candidates that they wanted to win.

Voting Booth

With 96% of the students voting, John McCain was the winner with 50% of the popular vote. 7th and 8th Grade discovered that while McCain received 50% of the popular vote using an “electoral” system resulted in his winning 60% of the electoral vote.

I was somewhat surprised that many of even the youngest students knew who the major candidates were. I was also impressed that quite a few of the older students really spent time looking at the issues site before they voted. At one point last week I was talking to the mother of one of my Kindergarten students and she was telling me how her daughter came home and was telling her all about the candidates for President. That’s the kind of thing I hoped would happen and I’m glad that it did.

It amazes me that more people did not vote in this election but it always amazes me that so many eligible voters do not go to the polls on Election Day. I knew we wouldn’t approach the 96% turnout that we had at school but it saddened me that the number of people voting did not increase significantly from 2004. Maybe in 2012 this will change.

November 14, 2008 Reflections No Comments on Current Events in the Lab

If Only

Do you find yourself saying things like if only I had new computers or if only our Internet connection were faster or if only we had a Smartboard or any other if onlys? I definitely do this because the equipment in our lab is very outdated or sometimes non-existent but then I have to stop to remind myself of what we are able to accomplish even with our outdated equipment! Here are some of my Wow – Look at what we HAVE or WILL be doing items.

The theme in the Computer Lab this year is It’s A Small World and in addition to learning the basics like: Internet Safety, Parts of the Computer, Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Keyboarding, we are participating in collaborative projects with other students around the world. This is where one of my If Onlys definitely comes in. Google Earth is an amazing way to introduce a project like this because you can fly around a 3D world to all of the places where schools are located. Unfortunately, the computers at school do not have new enough graphics cards or enough memory to support Google Earth. I have been able to use the 2D version of MSN’s Live Search Maps to show where the other schools are located. It’s not as impressive and doesn’t run really fast but it does at least give the students some idea of the scope of the project and where the other schools are in the world.

Kindergarten and 2nd Grade are working on a project called Online Autumn which is a project to have students in Kindergarten through 4th Grade share art work and creative writing about Autumn. 2nd Grade started this project using an on-line brainstorming tool and are currently working on pictures of the things they like most about Autumn. We will be creating either an interactive book or a VoiceThread from the pictures. Kindergarten will also be creating some art work and creating a book or VoiceThread too. There are schools from all over the United States and Canada participating in this project.

1st Grade will be participating in a project called How Tall is a First Grader with schools from all over the United States, Australia and Lebanon. This will be a fun project because 1st Grade will get to explore Excel and read some on-line interactive books and do some writing too and will be able to compare how tall they are to other 1st graders all over the world.

3rd Grade will be participating in a Monster Exchange project later in the year that will let them draw an original picture and write a description of it and then exchange their descriptions with another school to see if the other student can recreate their drawing. This is a project that can be done with or without computers but having computers adds an extra zing to the project because you can see the drawings compared and read the descriptive paragraphs right online.

Last year I discovered the collaborative project called Voices of the World and thought at the time how I would love to participate in it. Schools around the world record the voices of their children singing or saying something – for example: Introducing themselves, singing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, singing their National Anthem, etc. These are all shared on a wiki each month. This year 4th Grade is participating in this project along with other schools from the US, Scotland, Australia, Poland, Sweden, Lebanon, Greece, Norway & more! 4th Grade is really excited about this one and loved listening to some of last year’s projects before we worked on our first project for this year. Yes, this one brings an If Only too – we are limited on microphones in the lab and it would be great for every computer to have it’s own microphone. We are recording a lot in both this project and other things with our limited resources but it would be nice to have more.

5th Grade is just getting ready to start their collaborative project called TimeZone Experiences which includes schools from NJ, NY, IL, England and Australia. They will be learning all about Greenwich Mean Time and reporting on what they and their classmates are doing at each hour of the day and during each month of the year and getting to see what other students around the world are doing at the same hour of the day and/or month of the year.

6th Grade has joined a really fun year-long project called A Room With a View with over a hundred participating classes. The project was introduced using Live Search Maps and will involve taking a picture of the campus each month and reporting on the weather and other information about what they observed on the day the picture was taken. All of the 6th graders will also be reflecting on each month in a VoiceThread. I think it will be very fun to look back at the year once we are done. All of the parents can follow along during the year since the entire project will be posted online in the VoiceThread and on a wiki page that will be maintained by the 6th graders. This project and the 5th grade project might have a tiny If Only associated with them since both projects either need or should have a picture taken each month and another thing that I’d love to have is some digital cameras for student use. Now, I just bring in my camera and it works but it would be great to have some in the lab for projects like this.

7th Grade’s project, Human Genetics Project,  was chosen because it ties in with their Science curriculum for the year. They are currently learning all about Google Docs and how to collaborate with others on a document while they write part of the Introduction Letter for this project. They will then be collecting and analyzing data based on certain observable traits and then downloading and analyzing world-wide data about the same traits.

8th Grade isn’t participating (at this point anyway) in any specific collaborative project because they are creating their own Social Studies wiki. This project will hopefully enhance their Social Studies knowledge and help them to learn new useful and fun tools. Of course there are If Onlys with this one mainly because of the low amount of memory and limited amount of bandwidth available. There are times we run into roadblocks because of these things but that just means I have to think creatively or pair students up in order to accomplish what we want!

I’m really excited about some of the sites that the students are using as they complete projects and wait for others to finish. They allow the students to compete with other students around the world or contribute to worthy causes. If you haven’t visited Tutpup, I’d highly recommend it. All of the students love seeing which country they are competing against and don’t even seem to realize that they are practicing spelling skills or math facts. I really like the fact that the students can register but they really are safe because their screen name has nothing to do with their real name and there’s no chatting or anything like that to worry about having to monitor. Both Free Rice and Free Poverty donate to worthy causes based on correct answers in various quizzes. The students love that they’re donating to a good cause and have fun with the quizzes too.

So there you have it some of my Wow – Look at what we HAVE or WILL be doing items. Would these be better If Only? Well they would definitely be faster and there would probably be less outages and some things might be more engaging but better? Not necessarily. The learning going on and the things being achieved can be done (usually anyway) with even our outdated equipment but … If Only … you can’t blame me for wishing now can you?

October 11, 2008 Reflections 2 Comments on If Only
« Previous Page 6 7 8 9 10 11 12Next Page »