Mimio and other things

Today my school had a visit from the trainer for the NZ branch of the Mimio company. I spent an enjoyable hour with her, looking at the latest features of the Mimi interactive whiteboard. I particularly liked the codec that allowed you to embed movie files right into the active notepad page.

BlackBerry storm, please

BlackBerry Storm by StrebKR

Gadgets! *drools inappropriately*



There are gadgets I wish I had in RL - like, yeah, that iPhone would be awesome. Or a BlackBerry Storm... doesn't the idea of a BlackBerry with a touch screen fill you with desire?



Then there are gadgets I wish I had for school. I wish I had a whole class set of laptops that I could hand out whenever I wanted to do stuff. I wish I had a wireless keyboard that I could pass round for students to write their answers into a document that I have up on the projector screen. I wish I had a huge digital photoframe that I could use to display my students' work on constant loop in my classroom.



But I'll settle for the BlackBerry.

Java problem solved, wordle made of awesome

So, this is the wordle I made for a vocabulary exercise for a reading on convergent boundaries:



The idea is that they get the wordle and a list of vocabulary questions - not content, not yet - to answer. The questions are ordered from easy to hard, so that more able students can start with a harder question. After answering the questions, the students then go on to using the actual reading to answer content questions.

I'm pretty stoked with this, and think it will work well as a way of supporting vocabulary learning without being a boring list of definitions. I can circulate throughout the class and give support to students who are struggling without the rest of the class being bored.

In case anyone is interested, here are the questions (with the answers in brackets):

1. What are the four biggest words? (plate, earthquakes, mountains, collisions)
2. Put one word into the gap to complete the sentence using these words: Plate collisions _________ earthquakes and mountains (cause or make)
3. Find the word in the wordle that means:
   the part of the plate that collides with another plate (edge or boundary)
   the place where the land meets the sea (coast)
   a really big number (millions)
4. Make three sentence using words from the wordle (plus a, an, and, the, are and other joining words) (eg. When an oceanic plate meets a continental plate to make a convergent boundary, you get a trench in the ocean and a mountain range)
5. Plates come in two types – continental and oceanic. What do these words mean? (about continents and about oceans)
6. Adjectives are describing words, like tiny. Find four adjectives in the wordle. Write a sentence using each one (eg Plate collisions take place over a really huge time)
   

Next time, I want the students to make their own wordles. I just have to find a way for this to happen *makes a considering face*

Java problems make me scowl

So, I wanted to send you to wordle to see the awesome vocabulary activity I made for my Y10 students. But I'm having java problems *scowls* I will wait and see if it works at home, and then I will know that it is a school problem and can start to fix it.

Key words for e-learning

I'm a huge fan of wordle. There is something so satisfying about seeing keywords visualised in this way. I particularly like this one - I love how the words learning, create and interact dominate the image.

*meeps* Generation Y, web 2.0 and EPIC FAIL

At my school, the principal is really invested in teachers working to understand and cater for generation Y students. One of the ways we do this is through watching/reading/listening to research into generational change and some of the points of misunderstanding. One of the best I've seen was this presentation to the Australian Secondary Principals Association conference in 2008.

I love thinking about generational change and the huge cultural shifts that we see taking place as young people grow up and make sense of a world that is completely different - socially, economically and politically, to the world that their parents and (most of) their teachers were shaped by.

As a young teacher myself, I sometimes find myself acting as a translator to other teachers. Oddly, I also find myself acting as a translator to my students. Many of my students are not as computer savvy as a casual read of the literature would imply. A closer look at the literature reveals a more complex picture. I'll get into posting on that another time, when I can really engage with it.

But what triggered this today? It turns out that none of the students in this particular class had ever used or heard of *meeps* - or, for that matter, *hugs you* or any of the other common actions, encased in asterixes, that indicate an action in the middle of exposition. I use them all the time in blog posts and IM conversations and it really had not occurred to me that my students might not know what it means.

I would facepalm, but I don't think they'd get that either.

Nevermind.

*facepalms anyway*

The littlest things make people happy

Well. They make me happy, anyway. I found this cup in the staffroom on Wednesday afternoon, and it made me really, really happy. An emo!lesbian cup - obviously, it was made for me.

You know what my reponses were? First of all, excitement, because, dude. Emo!lesbians. Second? "I have to take a photo and post it to my blog"

So the photo of me with my cup went to my other blog, but this one, of my twin loves (the cup and my laptop) is for you to enjoy.

I'm on a talk show. You want to know what I do for a living?

I practice my patience - and my sarcasm and disbelieving stare. I shape young minds and nurture future leaders, and also explain why sexist jokes are never appropriate in a classroom or workplace. I eradicate 'gay' and 'homo' used as put-downs, all the while developing a disturbing fondness for other slang.

I'm a teacher. Sometimes we actually learn some science. Sometimes we learn to be better people. Both are good.

I get to have an unhealthy attachment to my laptop and drink a lot of coffee. My students make me laugh every single day. Sometimes they make me want to scream and break things.

You want to know what I make? Taylor Mali says it better than I could.

Task sharing and collaborative learning in an ICT environment

As in the two previous posts, I have been caught up with my Y9 Science class and their final group project on communities. Today we finally got down to the activity. My time spent on Tuesday drilling them about their roles in the task were not wasted, and I saw some awesome work produced. It's a shame that they didn't actually follow the instructions - you know, the ones that asked them to put their results into a googledoc that I had set up for each group *facepalm*

Nevermind. I am not giving up on the utility of googledocs as a tool for collaborative writing of reports and authoring of presentations online. I am going to keep experimenting until I get it right, dammit.

Dude. Just when I think that ICT can't get more awesome.

So, today I discovered that I can automatically publish googledocs to my blog. Huzzah. Excuse me while I flail.

Okay, I know that some of you are probably laughing at me right now, but my other blog doesn't support this feature so I have never noticed it before.

If you look below to the previous entry, you'll see a task sheet I made and shared with my Y9 Science students. Their task sheets are also googledocs, and they have access to them through their groups. They can work collaboratively to complete the tasks and record their results in other googledocs, that I can then assess online. No printing required *swoons* and the students get to assign roles and work collaboratively online.

Really. Can the interwebz get more awesome? Well, I suppose it could make me coffee.

Task sheet for example

You must produce one or more resource sheets and a question sheet, similar to the example ones made by your teacher. The resource sheet must contain all the information needed to answer the questions that you ask about your specific ecosystem. You may include questions about topics that we have covered in class so far. Your resource sheet and your questions must cover the following information:

1. Definition of an ecosystem and a description of your ecosystem (your ecosystem is a desert)

2. Food web of common species found in your ecosystem (common species in your ecosystem include fungus, bluebottle flies, brittle bush, chainfruit cholla, crimson hedgehog cactus, ants, grasshoppers, desert wrens, kangaroo rats, desert bighorn sheep, banded gila monsters and coyotes) showing the role of each species (ie producer, consumer etc) and how energy moves around the web, plus a definition of what a food web does. You will need to make the image of this in another program or draw it by hand and get it scanned.

3. Explanation of what a mutualistic (co-operative) relationship is and a description of how two species have a mutualistic relationship (your mutualistic relationship is between chainfruit cholla and desert bighorn sheep)

4. Explanation of what a competitive relationship is and a description of how two species have a competitive relationship (your competitive relationship is between grasshoppers and ants)

Your questions must be a mixture of factual recall and description and explanation. There must be at least six questions.

You must present your resource sheets and question sheet as googledocs. You have two periods to complete this work.

Internet down, teachers depressed and emo

The internet was down at school on Friday, thanks to a severed cable in town. Also down were teachers, filled with frustration, annoyance and a desperate lack of ways to occupy those snatched moments of leisure.

Okay, so I had to hastily re-write one lesson, but pretty much everyone I heard bitching about the outage was doing so because they couldn't get on to Facebook. Or whatever.

At least my students were sympathetic.

Presentations and hyperlinks

Today - well, last week, actually, but today brought it into focus - I discovered a small but interesting gap in the knowledge of my students.

My Y9 science class was making biological keys on powerpoints. The idea here is that you ask a series of questions that allow you to identify an animal or plant correctly. They can be quite sophisticated, but we are dealing with really obvious physical characteristics (for the most part). So I made an exemplar using snakes. I ask a question ('is the snake venomous?') that can have two possible answers ('the snake is venomous' or 'the snake is not venomous'). You go on asking questions until only one of your possible snakes meets the description, then it must be the snake you're after. Each answer, in this case, is then a hyperlink, taking the student to either the next question, or to a successful identification.

The interesting gap was the hyperlinks. Not the mechanics of how to make them, which is just a fact in the operation of the programme, but the whole idea of hyperlinks, of using them to jump from one place in a document to another, or from that document to another one entirely. Sure, students know how to click on them and what they do, but the idea of making one and using one to create a non-linear document was something that they had no real understanding of.

I hope they left my class today with a deeper understanding of how you can use hyperlinks to create connections between information and create a web of paths that can take you to more interesting places than a linear progression might. I suspect that many of them left with the knowledge of how to make a hyperlink to another slide in a powerpoint presentation, and are satisfied with not thinking about the wider picture.

Nevermind. I now have to upload all their powerpoints onto the class page, so they can show their family what they made. But that's a story for another day.

A stocktake of ICT in class

I know that lots of teachers at my school shake their heads and say that they can't use ICT, that there aren't enough applications for it, not enough ways to use it, it's not applicable and so on. So I took a snapshot of ICT usage a while ago and wrote myself a little table with the date, class and usage. I thought it might be interesting. It kind of is, partly as a little picture of what can be done, and partly (and worryingly) as a picture of how far I have to go until I am integrating ICT into my classroom practice to my own satisfaction. So, here is Feb 10th....

Y9 Science: used exploratree to record the results of a brainstorm into a diagram that can then be printed off. It would have been better with a wireless keyboard - or, even better, more computers so that it wasn't just kids calling out answers and me writing them in.

Y11 Science: used a youtube clip of a brainiac experiment of walking on custard in a states of matter experiment. You know, I'd love to give students more of a chance to give authentic responses to things like this, and to take part in real discussion. We have a youtube account, I must make more use of it

Y12 Physics: used a free Yenka resource and a youtube clip to demonstate electrostatic fields. This was done with the projector and me demonstrating, but I think it would have been far more effective for students to have viewed this in small groups at computer stations (or individually) and have shared their ideas and written their explanations collaboratively using the computer instead of me just talking to the animation/clip on the screen

So, three of four lessons that day had something simple in them. But there should be more. I should be thinking bigger, less demonstratively and more participatively. I'm going to come back to this idea, taking a snapshot - and hopefully, next time, not a month after the fact - and do it again to track how deep my ideas and techniques are getting.

The good, the bad and the paper

Paper = the bane of my life

I sometimes feel like I'm awash in papers, old and new and bizarrely inexplicable. My desk is deep in them, worksheets and assessment papers and marking schedules and schemes and reports and reminders and - is that a shopping list?

Note to self: make more use of the iGoogle to-do list. Also, keep the recycling bin close at hand. Consider making a student follow me round with it for any time I get given useless paper. Consider changing all assessments so they can be one on the computer and I don't have to handle bits of paper. Okay, so the last one is a bit of a pipedream, but I can live in hope, right?

How will I find the time to do anything else?

Today, while idly checking my Google Reader, I came across an interesting link via Mashable. A site that lets you check your username against the most popular social networking sites -
interesting for someone like me, who uses at least three different usernames, depending on context. Also, I realised that I didn't have an account at LastFM, and that would never do. I need new music to listen to at school - and my students can be exposed to a wider range too.

Go and check it out

YouTube is my happy place

Nearly every day, I am grateful for youtube. Today, it was the turn of my Y10s to benefit from the fact that people worldwide have waaay too much time on their hands.

We're studying electricity, and my class is up to generating electricity. We did a little thing yesterday on turbines and the main types of generation. Today I wanted to ease them into a reading activity on wind power, so we watched a video on youtube. I backed it up with a little worksheet, of course.

The video was a parody of NIMBYs and their complaints about wind farms. I thought it was hilarious. The students just thought it was odd. The worksheet asked students to tick the reasons against windpower that actually appeared in the video, and cross those that did not appear or had nothing to do with the video. Then there were a couple of more probing questions for the more advanced students - I see this class right after lunch on Wednesdays, so I didn't want anything too complicated.

It worked really well, was quick, simple, and made the students laugh (although they claimed that he wasn't funny, just annoying). What's not to love? If you need to have a laugh, just watch it and giggle