A few cool tech things

As the kids (and the teachers) start to wind up for our state standardized testing (AIMS) and other tests, stress levels rise and behavior goes down the tubes. Needless to say, this is true on both sides of the teacher's desk. So, as is usually my M.O., I've resorted to technology to ratchet down stress levels and behavior issues.

About a month ago, I ran across this genius idea by @rmbyrne on Twitter (author of the always excellent Free Technology for Teachers blog). His idea was to take a topic and compare what different technology sources say about it. So, since women's suffrage was next up in our march through US History, we read the 8 paragraphs in the textbook about women's suffrage, then read sections of the Wikipedia entry on the same topic, and then looked at primary source documents (which we've studied) about women's suffrage. Then, the students wrote blog posts explaining why they would choose one source over another, and how the information that was offered by each differed.

This turned out to be a great exercise. It benefitted the students in several ways. First, it showed them the beauty of Wikipedia (which they've discovered off-handedly, but we haven't done any direct work with). They weren't aware how much information could be found there, which needless to say, is a wealth of information. Next, in order to save time, which was not surprisingly, running short, I found about handful of primary source items available online (poems, photos, legislative documents, etc.) , showed them to the kids and explained them. First of all, they were very interested in them, which was great. But even better, I was shocked to discover that they were fascinated with the concept of the Library of Congress, where I'd found some of the sources. They just thought it was the coolest thing that there was a place where all these original sources were stored :-) Bonus for the LOC! And finally, they were able to reflect on which source was most effective in various ways on the class blog, by answering some questions I posed.

Speaking of the blog, I was thrilled to discover last week that somehow, a college class of students studying to be teachers discovered our class blog and posted lots of comments on it. The kids were THRILLED to see that other people actually cared about what they had to say!

New ideas and old stories

Here are a few random thoughts I'm submitting for your review. I hadn't posted anything in a while, so here is a little of "this and that" as my great grandma used to say. :-)

Last week I acquired a set of ActivExpressions which are devices which can send messages to my interactive whiteboard (ActivBoard). Their basically little texting devices with which they can send text messages to my board. When everyone has answered, it pops up a graph showing what percentage gave what answer. The kids love it. In fact, it's hard to keep their hands off of them. I take away about 2 of them a day for kids pretending to talk on their "cellphones." Seriously, it is amazing how much time 7th graders still spend just playing. Craziness. I'm still learning how to use them effectively as a learning tool. (I'm open to any suggestions!)

This week we started an immigration project, since we're studying the Industrial Revolution. My students are researching the story of particular immigrants during the late 1800's, and then they're choosing someone they know who's family has immigrated to the US sometime in the more recent past (in the last 75 years :-)). Then they'll interview that person (or someone in their family who knows the family immigration story) and compare and contrast the two stories. Theoretically, this is the plan. I'm having a hard time getting the kids to understand that the person they interview doesn't have to be 1) a family member, or 2) someone who personally immigrated themselves. We spent forever clarifying that today. Some of the kids themselves are immigrants, while the families of other students have been in the country for many generations. I think that when all is said and done, they should be great stories, but it'll take some time. We're actually struggling to find good stories from the late 1800's. Anyone

have any immigration stories from that era? Here's hoping for the best on that project!

Then tonight, from my wonderful PLN (personal learning network) of individuals that I follow on Twitter, I found a great new way of displaying students writing in images, called FlickrPoet. You paste or type in text (poetry or otherwise), and then it chooses related images from Flickr to illustrate your writing. I tried it with some rain poems my kids wrote on a very rainy Thursday last week. Below are screen shots of the images that it produced for one of the poems. Pretty cool, huh?

AIMS Reflections

A reflection on Arizona's Instrument to Measure Standards (AIMS) standardized test. I'm not generally a big poet, but I didn't think this one turned out too bad...







AIMS Day

Bubbling, bubbling, bubbling
Soft, nervous scribbling
A yawn, a stretch, a silent groan, a sigh
Got it!---wait! Nope, this is it… whew, that was close

Perfect bubbles, heavy and dark
Wheels turning, pondering, thinking, considering, wavering, confused
Hushed whispers=reading silently, lips move
Intent, must do well

A sea of sloppy bubbles
Eenie, meenie, miney, moe, C if you don’t know
Figuring, counting, calculating
Pages flipping

Bubbling, bubbling, endless bubbling…

-D. Shetler, April 2007