Tonight I successfully taught my first basic computer class for adults (at least, I think I was successful :-)) Thanks to some very helpful stimulus funding, we have been able to implement a so-called "Parent University" at our school, which enables us to offer free courses to interested parents and community members. We originally had offered classes in parenting, infant care, English, computers, consumer math, and algebra, but had such great demand that we are currently basically offering several sections of English and computers. So tonight, another teacher and I divided up the adults and took about 20 each.
After talking with kids all day, it's a bit unnerving to be teaching adults. I wrote my name on the board, and was shocked to realize that people were taking notes! Without being asked! :-) The other added "bonus" to the class (other than that most have never touched a computer) is that the vast majority of the students don't speak English (or at least not fluently). Hence, there was a lot of me holding up components and going, "KEYBOARD. Say it with me-"keyboard."" So, that added an extra challenge. In reality though, a truly basic computer class like this one is 50% teaching people a different language anyway. So today, our vocabulary was:
keyboard
mouse
monitor
CPU
cursor
click
double-click
shift
return
delete
So, for an hour on Mondays and Wednesdays, we're going back to the basics. It was actually kind of fun (outside all the running around to different computers to make sure everyone's looking at the right thing...) On top of that, it turns out that adults are much more engaged in learning :-) (I know, big surprise) So, we had a good time. Hopefully it continues as well as it started!
I just finished approving a bunch of my students' blog postings and faced the same dilemma I always come up against. Do I proofread their postings or not? I have no issues correcting simple mistakes in which words are skipped, repeated, etc. If they got a chance to read it again, they'd catch it. Those aren't mistakes kids tend to learn from. However, other mistakes--spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes, phrasing--all of these things are mistakes from which kids can learn lessons for the next time around, and which they won't learn unless someone TELLS them they're wrong. Also, I hate to put my kids' writing out onto the great, big, public internet without looking perfect (because it makes BOTH of us look bad).
On the other hand, if I put it out there WITH the mistakes, maybe it's teaching them a lesson to proofread their own work closer before submitting it, and/or that they should have someone else read it before submission.
Teachers tend to have strong (and very opposite) opinions on this topic, so it's bit pointless to discuss this with them, unfortunately. This posting is an attempt to get some valuable outsider opinions about this topic :-) Let me know your thoughts. Now that I think about it, for an even broader perspective, I'm going to see what my kids think. I'll post this as a blog posting for them to respond to and we'll see if they can form some relevant opinions on the topic (and maybe even use the persuasive techniques we've been talking about).
It is Thanksgiving and my desks runneth over. I got student #31 on Tuesday, and I am now officially out of student desks. This one has a seat, but the next one won't. I told our curriculum specialist this and she responded, "No problem, we've got more desks in room 59." Dang it, that wasn't the point!
This last new student is a doozy though. He is about to be 14 and got moved to my 7th grade class from 6th grade. Yes, you read that correctly. He was held back twice for varying reasons, and they realized this year that if he completes 6th grade this year, goes into 7th grade next year, he'd be 16 while in 8th grade, and we're not legally allowed to have 16 year olds on our PreK-8 campus. Hence (or thus, as my students would say), he'd have to go straight to 9th grade after 7th. (Can you start to hear the splintering of the system going on here?) So, the new genius plan is to put him in 7th grade for the rest of this year (effectively skipping 6th grade), and then he'll be on track. However, he's already falling far behind 6th grade standards, so how in the world is he going to survive 7th grade standards, and jumping into them in the middle, to boot!
At lunch, I mentioned that I got this student, and the 5th and 6th grade teachers all got this slack-jawed look of fear in their eyes, and said, "You got HIM??? Good luck...." Then stories came pouring out explaining how terrible this kid is for every teacher he's with. Needless to say, a feeling of dread soaked through me at that point. After day 1, he did ok, but I don't know... On an acadmic level, I don't know how it will every work. On a behavioral level, if I can keep him scared stiff of the 7th graders (which he currently is), it might work. I know, I know, that's not a good strategy. I'm mainly just hoping that his behavior issues were a function of being stuck with age-inappropriate peers. Time will tell...
Whew, it's been an adventurous week in the classroom! (And by that, I mean disastrous!) Due to my PREVIOUSLY excellently-behaved classroom, their horrible behavior this week was a shocker! I don't know if it's due to my sudden influx of new students or the holidays, but needless to say, it requires a bunch more work on my part.
Either way, (luckily) they still do not cease to be entertaining. As of late, we've been discussing the Civil War in History. Wars in history are completely unknown to these kids. As far as they knew, the Civil War involved someone handing out guns on both sides and people running around shooting anything that moved for four years straight, non-stop. So, we had to put that notion to bed. Needless to say, the fact that armies would line up, and then start running at each other with guns was a completely foreign concept (and quite distressing, as well!) After a discussion of the surprising violent Battle of Bull Run, one particularly innocent student looks up at me and says, "Mrs. Shetler, how come they didn't just use pillows instead of guns? It would have been so much safer!" Bless his heart...
Then, the next day as we were continuing this discussion about Civil War battles, a student asks me, "Mrs. Shetler, who were we?" As in, which side were we on? Another kid pipes up, "Yeah, did we win?" I was literally speechless. How does one answer this? Technically, Arizona wasn't a state (and wouldn't be for another 50 years) so the residents had no "side." I couldn't tell him that "we" (as in the US) won, because I'm sure that's not how Civil War history is taught in South. They're so used to it being "us against them" in all other wars in history, as well as in every video game they play. I ended up telling them some adaptation of what I described above, but this was just very difficult for them to understand :-) If nothing else, I just had to laugh at how much this question stumped me!
On an unrelated note, my students randomly get excited about using new words (even down to making up words just for the sake of using new words). A while ago, we were reading a poem that used the word "shall" and I mentioned in passing that it was a more formal, fancy way of saying "will." Next thing I knew, I had a girl who was telling me, "I shall try inverse operations, but I'm not sure about it..." Then this week, I had another student randomly start using the word Thus. So now, I had 13 year olds running around saying, "I lost my voice, and thus I shouldn't talk today." "...and thus, Arturo rode his bike over my foot." "Thus the water moves the sediment down the river," etc. It's hilarious :-) I tell them to keep using those words, because it'll guarantee them a great score on their state writing tests, because it is so unexpected!
The following video is basically unrelated, but a great excuse to combine Jack Black and school :-)
When I got my Activboard last year, I was not informed I needed or even might want to consider any training. Additionally, there are very strict requirements as to who gets these boards, and I was never informed what I did to deserve it. Don't get me wrong, I ADORE it, and have been begging for one for years. It's just that, as with many other tech integration ideas, I was given the technology and then was expected to take the initiative and figure it out myself (in my vast amount of spare time). Unfortunately, this is why millions of dollars worth of technology goes unused in schools every day. In fact, I have seen the exact same thing happen in the past two weeks as people walk in to their classrooms in the morning to discover and Activboard there, with no knowledge of how to even turn it on.
Because of my interest in technology, I did take it upon myself to take all the training I could find, and then experiment with it. However, like I said, too many others don't. I'm very glad I took the training, but even so, while it did a great job explaining how to use the actual software, it didn't do such a good job of showing how it could be used effectively to help students learn more in the classroom. Hence, ever since this summer, I've been designing a better course in the back of my head.
Here comes the intersection of my teaching and what I've been learning in my ed tech master's program at NAU. This semester and next, my major (and final) project is to create a project that supports professional development in educational technology. How perfect! What I'm learning is something that is directly necessary at the school level! For this reason, I've spent nearly the entire first day of my fall break planning a 4-week online course in Beginning Use of Activboard Software. For once, it's been exciting working on a school project! (Actually, that's been true of much of my Master's program.) Now, I actually create the online course shell and then wait to see how it actually plays out in the coming months... Here's hoping for the best :-) Have any of you (my vast world of readers) ever taken an online course? Was your experience positive or negative? Why?
Wow! Talk about a long time coming! Today my students and I were finally able to blog, but it took us 7 weeks of school to get there.
I'm using the Edublogs site, which forces all posts and comments to go through me before they are published (which is very helpful). After deciding to use blogs with the kids (and do it right!) I located an extremely helpful blog posting (fitting) which had 5 lessons for introducing kids to blogging. We started out talking about what blogs were by looking at a number, then we looked at a few PSA videos about safe posting online and cyberbullying (made a BIG impression on the kids!), and finally discussed what made meaningful posts as well as helpful comments.
After getting all this done, I started our class blog. Through Edublogs, you can either set up student blogs individually or set up one class blog in which students have individual logins and categories. To be on the safe side, I started with one class blog. If students can prove they are posting high quality posts and meaningful comments, they will be able to get their own blog.
The only issue that came up for this was finding email addresses to use with the kids. Since many of my students don't have computers/internet at home, many don't have email addresses, which is required to sign up for many online things. In most cases, the point of what we are doing is not that they have an email address, but that they can be verified through the address. Hence, (again from the same helpful blog post) I discovered that I can actually create 20 sub-emails under my own gmail account, which was really helpful. Using my teacher gmail, I added all the students who didn't have email already (around 18) and then all account information was automatically sent to me. (Way simpler for me to keep track of than irresponsible 12 year olds!)
After much ado, and much playing around with Edublogs, I finally fixed all the glitches with accounts, passwords, invitations, etc, and was prepared for today. Of course, before we could even log on to our class blog, we spent the requisite 15 minutes waiting to get a consistent internet signal. (This has been the norm with the laptops this year. After about 15 minutes of the wireless signal dropping in and out, we're good to go the rest of the time.) My kids were extremely patient as they waited through a ridiculous internet connection, and 27 other kids to catch up to them. But when it finally all came together, it worked like a charm!
While I could have forced kids to perfect their posts before I allowed them to be published (and probably will enforce this next time), I decided that for the first time out, I'll let them see what their writing (and commenting) looks like to the rest of the world. This worked like a charm. A number immediately realized mistakes they had made (but couldn't unless I did it for them). For their first post, I had everyone just post general information about themselves (family, hobbies, etc.) One girl described her best friend, and immediately regretted publishing it, as 3 other girls then approached her and asked why they hadn't been listed. Tough lessons, but I think the point was made.
So overall, it was a good experience and I think it can only get better! Good luck to my class! Please come comment on the blogs too, the kids will love it!
So, a new year has begun. I have new faces and old faces in my 7th grade classroom. About 5 of my 30 kids were in my class last year, much to my chagrin. They're great kids, but I just REALLY like starting my year fresh. Oh well. I have the gifted "cluster" of students, which means I have 3 or 4 gifted kids and the rest are about middle ground. After my first day, my only real opinion was, "At least I didn't have a kid come in that was aiming to be trouble from the second he stepped foot in the door." And so far, that has proved to be true. The more I think about it though, the more of a good omen it seems.
Although things are still not perfect, every year gets a little better, and I get a little bit more confident. Overall, I feel like I have a pretty decent class, near as I can tell. At one point today (Day 9), it occurred to me how well they all seem to get along, and how rare that is! Last week all the specials teachers said the class was good, but that means nothing the first week because all the kids are good. However, I give the compliment to the kids anyway. A compliment is a compliment, right? The first time I did this, my 6th graders didn't know what a compliment is, but now every kid knows what it is and is listening intently for it. The reason for the intense desire for compliments is because we have a compliment paper chain started in the classroom, so that every time they get a compliment from another teacher, they get another link. When it gets to the specified length (around 40 or 50), they get a pizza party. (I know, I know Mom, I shouldn't reward them with food...After a while with 13 year olds though, you do what works.)
Anyway, to say the least, now the kids listen very keenly for compliments. So today, they had 2 specials (don't ask me why), and it's not uncommon for the teachers to tell me as the kids are leaving if they did well. However, the kids claimed that both teachers had given them compliments which I didn't hear (it's also not uncommon for kids to make up compliments :-)) so I said I'd talk to those teachers later. However, BOTH of those teachers tracked ME down later in the day to tell me how much they enjoyed working with my class today, how good they are, and how they all participate and get along! Yay!!
Part of me feels like this is a bit too good to be true and/or that maybe I'm jinxing this, but I guess time will tell...
