My First Prezi

I have played around with Prezi for a couple of months, but finally used it in class today.  In my middle school Social Studies class, I teach a Holocaust unit coinciding with my students' reading of The Diary of Anne Frank in Language Arts.  My topic today was Ravensbruck, a women's concentration camp in Germany where I visited in 2008.  My Prezi, Support and Comfort in Ravensbruck, supplemented our conversation and set up a following analysis of art by Ravensbruck survivors. The Prezi took me about 15 minutes to create (but again, I've done some experimenting previously). Mine is very simple, but there are lots of more complicated visual effects that you can build in.

I love Prezi's intuitiveness on both the creation side and viewing side.  Its strength is that it's not locked into a linear structure, but you can still use the "Path" function to create a narrative. I like that you can choose from several color/font schemes, ranging from somber to splashy, so it can be appropriate for almost any content. A Prezi can be used to supplement an in-person lecture or presentation, or it can be designed to BE a self-contained, complete presentation online. Prezi has free educational licenses for teachers and students.

Edmodo and Student Collaboration

Each year, the 7th graders at my school do Travel Fair.  Each group takes on the role of a travel agency and pitch a visit to an assigned country to the Fair's visitors (other students, teachers, and parents).  We take over the entire gym.  It's noisy and colorful and chaotic (280 kids this year), and just completely low-tech. And this year, I'm the coordinator. 

I am slowly attempting to drag Travel Fair into the 21st century.  Last year,  I emphasized online research-- very web 1.0. This year, I tried to focus a bit more on online collaboration.  In the past, Travel Fair groups met at each other's homes.  Now our kids are spread out over a large county, and asking parents to cart them all over the place isn't practical.

I set up an account at Edmodo, a private social networking platform for education.  It's completely private and it's one of the few social networking sites that isn't blocked by our district. Within Edmodo, I set up one "group" for my entire class, another for each period, and finally one for each country group. In Edmodo, my students can share files, links, and comments with one another.

Here's a screenshot from my 3rd period Jamaica group:

The format is very comfortable for Facebook users, they enjoy being able to social network at school, and it really is handy for group collaboration.

Next goal-- using Edmodo for student assignments.

Alfie Kohn vs. Dwight Shrute

A great illustration of intristic vs. extrinisic motivation and the idiocy of token-based economies in education.  Dwight's apparently a B.F. Skinner fan.

Note to Legislators...

Via Indexed.

(insert squeal of delight here)

Is it August 24 yet?

Backchannel Chat with TodaysMeet

I'm working on incorporating more technology tools into my teaching. The Free Technology For Teachers blog has been invaluable-- I find something new to try on a weekly basis, if not more often. Recently I used backchannel chat with TodaysMeet, one of the few sites that can be used for private chat that isn't blocked by my school district. I had the students conduct a chat while viewing a video (Rick Steves' Iran) and learned a few things:

• Providing a few minutes of "play" time was essential. They were able to get their "OMG THIS IS SO COOL!!1!1!"s out before we started the actual content.  
• Also essential:  very clear rules about appropriate vs. inappropriate chat.  One unforeseen wrinkle was that my students are obviously used to ragging each other while chatting-- I had to add a "No insults" guideline.
• 24 kids + one chat room = chaos.  I wound up asking them to restrict themselves to 10 comments during the video.
• An effective teacher pauses video content frequently to process with students.  This way, we didn't have to keep pausing, although I did once or twice when the situation warranted it. 
• Connected to the above: I had to be much more engaged as a teacher than I generally am during a video.  The kids were not only answering the questions I posted on the board, they were asking me how things were spelled, explanations for things they were confused about, etc. 
• The kids were also much more engaged.  In Kagan Cooperative Learning (the love of my teaching life), teachers are instructed to ask themselves, "What percent of the students are overtly active at once?"  A quick scan of the room showed maybe 1/4 to 1/2 of them in the process of typing a response at any given time.  They were keeping track of the chat, watching the video, and thinking about their own responses.  They most definitely worked harder than the typical video-with-a-worksheet (even more than a really good video with a really good worksheet)-- and they liked it more. 

TodaysMeet could be used across classrooms, with multiple classes logging into the same chat room.  I'm not secure enough to have students backchannel chat while I'm conducting a lesson at this point.  I feel like I need to be able to monitor the chat carefully while it's happening.  For in-class video viewing, though, I think it's going to be my new go-to activity.

Merit Pay, Teacher Pay, and Value Added Measures

This video by Prof. Daniel Willingham describes six problems with value-added merit pay plans.

I am pro-merit pay, or I would be, if someone could figure out a way to do it that actually reflected teacher performance. Even value-added measures don't. (I wish they hadn't used the word "fair" in the video. The issue isn't fairness, it's the VALIDITY of the measures used. Yes, when you're talking about measuring performance for pay that's essentially the same thing as fairness, but sounds more scientific and less prone to inspiring complaints about "whiny" teachers.) 

Imaginary Teachers

I was really into those teacher movies as a teenager, the ones where the Amazing Teacher turns the lives of downtrodden-yet-plucky youngsters who just need a little love (and generally the ruination of the teacher’s entire life) to succeed. Dead Poets’ Society, Mr. Holland’s Opus, Dangerous Minds, loved ‘em. They’re terribly unrealistic, though, and definitely not the direction I want my own teaching career to go. (I like a little emotional health, thank you.)

Teachers in children’s literature are a different breed than the Martyr Teacher of the movies. Here are a few of my favorites.

Miss Honey, Matilda by Roald Dahl
Miss Honey is perfect. She never raises her voice, quietly resists the evil Miss Trunchbull (seems like there’s always an evil teacher to balance the good one), and is the only one to recognize Matilda’s gifts. I adored a couple of my teachers the way that Matilda adores Miss Honey, but none of my teachers were that perfect. Thank goodness, since teachers have enough pressure on us as it is without trying to ascend to angelic status. (Matilda also has an opening that I absolutely love, especially on my meaner and more irritable days, when the narrator talks about what teachers would REALLY like to say in their report card comments.)

Miss Stacy, Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Another one of those bad-teacher/good-teacher situations, Miss Stacy replaces Mr. Phillips, who is harsh, hates Anne, and spends most of his time attempting to romance one of his older students. (Ewww.) Miss Stacy has her students going on nature walks and acting out battles (teaching with Multiple Intelligences before we knew about Multiple Intelligences!), which worries the good citizens of Avonlea. She’s all about the whole child. I have the feeling that Miss Stacy would not be a high-stakes standardized testing fan.

Ms. Finney,The Cat Ate My Gymsuit by Paula Danziger
Ms. Finney is a modern-day (well, 1970s) Miss Stacy, using unconventional methods to teach English and encouraging her kids to question authority (uh-oh). Main character Marcy, who hates just about everything, loves Ms. Finney and is one of the students who go to her defense when she loses her job due to her political views. Marcy is smart, sarcastic, overweight, and socially inept. Ms. Finney accepts her the way she is and helps her start on the way to liking herself as well as teaching her. I’ll never be as cool as Ms. Finney, but like her I want to be there for the Marcys in my classes. (I was a Marcy. Heck, I still am a Marcy.)


Mr. Carpenter, the Emily books by L.M. Montgomery
The trilogy starting with Emily of New Moon is one of L.M. Montgomery’s lesser-read series, but I actually prefer it to the Anne books. Mr. Carpenter is not the paragon that Miss Stacy is. He’s cynical, an alcoholic, a burned-out local prodigy who was expected to have a brilliant career but ended up "a country schoolteacher at forty-five with no prospect of being anything else." Emily is an aspiring writer, and the first time she takes him her writing, he thoroughly trashes most of it. He finds “ten good lines” out of the pile of stories and poems she gives him, and at first she is devastated, until he explains that ten good lines is an achievement at her age, and IF she keeps working, in ten years she'll be able to write a hundred. Emily walks away from that meeting with renewed determination to improve her writing and earn Mr. Carpenter’s respect, and that’s a better outcome than a series of smiley stickers and “Great job!” comments scrawled across student work could ever produce. Also, there's a great quote about his teaching style: "Mr. Carpenter never tried to keep order, apparently. But somehow he kept his students so busy that they had no time to do mischief."

The teachers in Harry Potter might deserve a post of their own, one of these days: Dumbedore, McGonagall, Lupin, Snape, Umbridge, Slughorn and the rest provide lots of food for thought!

Any other teachers in film, TV, or literature that have stuck with you, good or bad?

State writing test produces “Stepford Writers”

In Florida, 4th grade (which I taught for several years) is the Year of FCAT Writing. We spend months feverishly preparing our kids to prewrite, organize, draft, and revise a 4-5 paragraph essay, which must be on topic, descriptive, creative, and mechanically correct… in 45 minutes. Keep in mind that these little guys are NINE YEARS OLD.

Since the advent of the test (I was one of the first batch of test-takers, with the 8th grade version) teachers figured out that the easiest way to get high scores was to teach their kids formula writing. After all, some of our most creative and effective writers scored low on the test because they didn’t have a conclusion (too busy writing to notice that time was almost up) or because they panicked (no time for emotion-- this is FCAT!). So—make sure they get in elements A, B, and C (and D-M or so) and they’ll “pull a 4.” Creativity? Well, as long as they toss in few similes, some onomatopoeia… maybe they’ll get up to a 5. Creativity is a luxury during FCAT writing.

So it was no surprise to me when I saw this article about elementary schools being warned for teaching their kids… formula writing.

PALM BEACH COUNTY - The same phrases kept appearing on FCAT essays by numerous fourth-graders in Palm Beach, Broward and 10 other county school districts: "I ran as fast as wild fire," "Poof!", "In the blink of an eye," and "Now you can clearly see" are just a few of the common word choices noticed by scorers this year.

Guess what? Teachers often have lists of descriptive and organizational phrases kids can use. Often these are generated by the kids themselves and stay up on the board all year, being added to when some comes up with a new one. We take them down during the tests, of course. However, they provide a quick mental shorthand for test-stressed kids—“I ran…” (insert remembered simile here) “as fast as wildfire!” Are you going to penalize kids for using clichés? Maybe the teachers at these schools went a little too far with this, although clearly not far enough to warrant anything more than a hand-slap and some embarrassing press.

What surprised me was that the Education Deparment was shocked, SHOCKED to find out that kids were being taught “template writing” (which, by the way, is not the same thing as a bunch of kids using the same simile or concluding phrase.)

In a November analysis from the state Education Department . . . cited the danger that students would become "Stepford Writers. They may look like writers, act like writers, think they're writers, but they are really task completers -- practicing for FCAT Writing."

So using a phrase like “Now you can clearly see” means that the student’s writing isn’t original? What, and using “in conclusion” or “to summarize” instead would have been original? The Education Department wouldn’t have cared if there was just a tad more variation (translation: teachers, make your phrase lists longer). FCAT writing has been producing “Stepford Writers” for fifteen years with no sign of stopping. Moreover, it’s producing Stepford Writers who HATE TO WRITE.

If we want a test with any kind of authenticity, let’s allow the kids to pick their topics. Even a choice of two or three would be better than none. Let’s give them more time, maybe two hours or even stretch the test over two days the way some states do. Let’s honor our students’ different learning and processing styles by giving them time to reflect and revise.

More than that, let’s bring down the stakes, so teachers can spend time on something other than FCAT during their writing instruction. Let’s allow 4th grade and 8th grade and 10th grade students to do REAL WRITING, in multiple stages, the way most of us did in school and the way we teachers were taught to in our education classes. Let’s revive the lost art of the Final Draft. Let’s give our kids time to savor and enjoy writing again.

Until that happens, Florida Education Department, don’t pretend surprise when kids churn out formulaic writing.