January 8, 2013

January 3, 2013

  • Wrapping It All Up in a Bow.

    Tomorrow:

    - Email Will Xtranormal videos before 10:30?
    - Pick up syllabi at Copy Center.
    - Boot Camp Lunch and Show&Tell from 11:30am - 1pm.
    - Appt. at 2pm.
    - Update English 120 dates on syllabus and in the course shell.
    - Ask Shannon to copy 3pm Eng110 eCompanion shell to other shells?

January 2, 2013

  • Headache.

    I just sent my syllabi off to the awesome Copy Center people... after eight years, you'd think I'd just get into a rut and call it good.

    Nope.
    I just have to dink around with those schedules and beef them up and change crap around. It's like picking a scab.
    Sort of.

  • Tech Boot Camp Notes.

    Garageband Notes:

    + Open Podcast or Voice Project.
    + Click on Male or Female voice.
    + Record voice using red button at bottom; it's best to have a transcript in front of you for uploading to eCompanion after (and for something to follow).
    + Click the play button when you are finished.
    + Cut out pieces by putting the red line where you want to split the piece (under Edit) and then delete that piece.
    + Try different voices by double-clicking the voice button at the top left (where you chose Male or Female).
    + Save the project.
    + Once ready to Share or place into eCompanion, click the Share button and export to iTunes or as a Podcast to a disk.
    Voki Notes:
    + Useful for cute little messages to students. The free version allows messages under 60 seconds in length.
    + Can not be saved to a computer.
    Xtranormal Notes:
    + Takes some getting used to, but do email them to set up an educator's account - you get more points that way (thousands! And the videos "cost" around 300 points or less each).
    + Can directly copy and paste text (from an instructional guide/handout) into the "story" part and put some actions/motions/camera angles to use.
    + These can be saved to your computer so you have them forever; it does cost some points to do that, however.
    + These can also be transferred/shared with YouTube, so that may help with the longevity?

  • Bootcamp: Voki.

    For my Project 2...

December 27, 2012

  • Less Teachin', More Learnin' ?

    The interesting chunks of story below are from here.

    She did not give us a list of countries, but she laid out a lot of images of different countries and asked us to look around to figure out which ones we were interested in writing about. (I often wonder what she would have done with the Internet during this project.) As I looked through the images, I was totally drawn to the country of Brazil and knew that was what I wanted to learn more about.  Instead of sharing what things we had to write about for our grade, she asked us to develop questions of what we wanted to learn.

    “Huh?  You want ME to develop the questions?  How will I know what you want me to show you if you don’t tell me what you want?”I was actually a little upset about the assignment at first.  At a young age, I had already seemingly mastered school.  You tell me what you need, and I will give you that.  You ask the questions, I give you the answers.  A very simple process and probably why I don’t remember much about my “learning” in elementary school.Mrs. Sloane, who was our social studies teacher that year had thrown me off.  This seemingly was way too much thinking and not enough doing. 
    Cut to him teaching Health years later:

    I took all of the curriculum objectives, put them on a board and told the kids that we were going to try something different.  They would pick one of the objectives that they were interested in, and teach it to the class.  My time would be more focused on planning for the “important” subjects and in reality, they could do the teaching for me.  The kids looked at me as if I was crazy when they should have looked at me as being lazy.  They asked me how they needed to present it and I simply told them that it would be up to them.  I would expect them to do what they need to learn about their curriculum, explore some questions that they had about the objective, and present in a way that they thought would be compelling to others.  I also told them that instead of doing this for 40 minutes a week, we were going to spend every afternoon on it for a few weeks.  To me, this was a way to get through this curriculum so that I could do the other stuff.

    Then a weird thing happened.  Kids everyday were coming to class and asking, “When are we doing health?”, and it became their obsession.  They were spending their lunch hours, home time, and any minute going over their topic.  I was no longer the teacher but acted more like an academic advisor providing help along the way.  Way less time teaching and a lot more time learning.  They were curious about their topics in a way than if I stood in front of the room and shared with them my knowledge, I could not replicate.
    How can incorporate these goals of his?

    -Give students the opportunity to explore what they are interested in.

    -Help them ask powerful questions.
    -Give them time to explore.
    -Students should be able to share what they have learned in a compelling way.

  • Dr. Seuss was a Genius. Duh.

    "You can get so confused
    that you’ll start in to race
    down long wiggled roads at a break-necking pace
    and grind on for miles across weirdish wild space,
    headed, I fear, toward a most useless place.
    The Waiting Place…

    …for people just waiting.
    Waiting for a train to go
    or a bus to come, or a plane to go
    or the mail to come, or the rain to go
    or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow
    or waiting around for a Yes or a No
    or waiting for their hair to grow.
    Everyone is just waiting.

    Waiting for the fish to bite
    or waiting for wind to fly a kite
    or waiting around for Friday night
    or waiting, perhaps, for their Uncle Jake
    or a pot to boil, or a Better Break
    or a string of pearls, or a pair of pants
    or a wig with curls, or Another Chance.
    Everyone is just waiting.

    NO!
    That’s not for you!

    Somehow you’ll escape
    all that waiting and staying.
    You’ll find the bright places
    where Boom Bands are playing.

    With banner flip-flapping,
    once more you’ll ride high!
    Ready for anything under the sky.
    Ready because you’re that kind of a guy!"

    -from Dr. Seuss' Oh, The Places You’ll Go!

  • RWE.

    "Courage charms us, because it indicates that 
    a man loves an idea better than all things in the world, 
    that he is thinking neither of his bed, nor his dinner, nor his money, 
    but will venture all to put in act the invisible thought of his mind."
    -Ralph Waldo Emerson

  • The 20% Project.

    This is something I heard about at the TIES conference. I think I'd like to try something similar to what this teacher is doing below, but I may use the last week of school as the 20% time, instead of throughout the semester? And I may state that they'll receive effort points instead of just saying it won't be graded... or something like that.
    ---

    “Google’s “20% Time”, inspired by Sergey Brin’s and Larry Page’s Montessori School experience, is a philosophy and policy that every Google employee spend 20% of their time (the equivalent of a full work day each week) working on ideas and projects that interest that employee. They are encouraged to explore anything other than their normal day-to-day job. As a result 50% of all Google’s products by 2009 originated from the 20% free time, including Gmail. Real break-through happens when we are free from others’ expectations and driven by individual passion.”

    ASSIGNING THE 20% TIME
    The day after winter break I “assigned the project”. In essence, high school students have spent most of their academic lives being told what to do. Their grades are then dependent on how well they completed the assigned tasks. Most teenagers spend their free time doing things they are “not told to do”. For example, most parents aren’t yelling at their son to play video games, or at their daughter to spend three hours on Facebook. These actions are done because teenagers want to do them (and in part because they are told many times not to do this). My class agreed that most teenagers “want to do what they want to do, and not what others tell them”.So this project, I said, was me telling them to do something that they want to do, with their time that it is usually spent doing what other people want them to do (that’s a mouthful). The guidelines were simple.

    Here is her handout: 

    The 20% Project:
    1. For the rest of the year, 20% of your time in my class will be spent working on something you want to work on.
    2. It has to be some type of learning, and you have to document it (journal etc).
    3. You’ll present your accomplishments to the class twice (and will not be graded on it).
    4. That’s it. Have fun. Find your passion. Explore it. Enjoy learning what you want.
    The comments at the end helped with responses to students' inquiries:

    Enforcing the Project: "This question did come up in my class. I said “if you do not want to take this opportunity seriously and would rather be graded on an assignment, I’ll gladly assign you a different project for the rest of the year that I will grade you on.” He stayed with the 20% project.The accountability is in the documentation and the presentations. More of a peer accountability than anything else (which I think is powerful). I’d be happy to hear any suggestions!"

    I am the Cool Project. The 20% Project.
    by: scrible77

    Now, as for amounts... I see my students for about three hours a week, for about 16 weeks. That's 48 hours, but let's use 45 since usually we miss at least a day (3 hours) due to me being sick or something. Twenty percent of that is 9 hours. And that would be 3 week's worth of time. Wow. I was just going to devote a week (3 hours) to this project, but I may have to add in another week in the middle of the semester for start-up time or something. Or MAYBE it should be an all-semester thing. Twenty percent of each week would be half of a class period, right? (Yes, 9 hours divided by 16 is .5 hours.) Huh. I think I could manage that as well, right? And have two presentation times?

  • "Gwen Stefani" in my Classroom.

    "Gwen Stefani" Explains English 120.
    by: scrible77

    "Male Me" Explains English 110.
    by: scrible77