Suppl_eMINTS

Classroom Management & Online Projects

Wow!  That was a long day we all spent together!  I hope everyone was able to glean something from all the content we covered and discussions had over the seven hours or so of training.  I also hope you are not already burnt out.

I wanted to revisit a few of the key points and some great resources to get you on your way…

Classroom Management: I know that many of you are masters at managing your classrooms and some of you are always looking for new ways to facilitate learning.  With the new year approaching, you have different considerations for classroom management than you did just a year ago.

Really think carefully about your classroom norms.  It’s alright to have a few in mind.  It’s even OK to include a couple that are extremely important to you, but make sure to include student input on those norms.  They will feel more ownership in how the classroom runs this year than if a list of rules are dicatated to them.  Also, be sure to word your norms as what students should do instead of what not to do.  For example, instead of the rule “no talking,” try the norm “listen to others when they speak.”  The goal is to get students to pay attention to each other or the teacher.  A norm should give the desired behavior.

To get your year off to a great start, you should focus your efforts on management and behavior almost exclusively.  The best way to ensure that these norms can be maintained throughout the year is by building a positive classroom community.  Check my links for community building activities here.  Don’t reinvent the wheel.  Use some of these resources to plan out your first days of school.  For secondary teachers, you could do the same activity with every class.  Elementary teachers may want to do one in the morning and one in the afternoon in order to break the monotony of the day.  Either way, have a little fun with it and get to know your students.  Building relationships with them now will pay off in the long run!

For the rest of my links related to classroom management, click here.

Online Projects: The key to a good online project is to think about the ways in which you can make it transform student learning through an authentic task.  Start out small, like an email project or a class blog, then think of ways you can transform some of your old lessons into a real world project that incorporates some form of online tools or networking.

If you wanted to access many of the resources from our training session, go here.

Some tools to consider for online projects are listed below:

EduBlogs - This is a safe, user-friendly tool for blogging.  You may remember that we had trouble with this tool last winter, but it seems to be working much better these days.  I still use it, in case you couldn’t tell.

Gaggle - Gaggle offers blogging and email options that can make online projects interactive and transcend borders.

E-Pals - Some people mentioned E-Pals as a great resource for pen pal projects.

Youth Twitter - This is the kid-safe version of the micro-blogging pioneer.

Earth Day Suggestions

Earth Day is approaching and I figured many of you would like some suggestions of how to utilize your new machines for this very timely event.

Carbonrally offers its users an opportunity to challenge each other in carbon-reduction behavior. Challenge the classroom down the hall to recycle paper or turn the lights off when not in the classroom and measure the effect on the environment. Middle school and high school students could probably run their own challenges, while the site is better used between entire elementary classes or families.

EarthLab, according to their website, “is a leading climate crisis community that provides a practical guide to green living through community interaction, exclusive environmental news, advice from experts and key analysis.” What does EarthLab have to offer? Where do I begin? They have the carbon calculator, a survey that determines an

Tox Town allows students to look at various human environments and the environmental factors that affect them. It is geared toward middle and high school students, but the interface is inviting to upper elementary.

EcoKids contains many interactive games with environmental content. However, beware of the trap to just set students free on the games. What are you goals for using games? What content do you want the students to gain from using class time playing games? This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use games to teach the content; it just means be careful and purposeful. Your friendly, neighborhood EPA also has a site with environmental games at EPA Environmental Kids Club.

I hope these resources will give you some ideas for Earth Day. It’s important to address these issues throughout the school year, but Earth Day provides a great opportunity to peak student interest.

[Picture of Earth source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Earth-Erde.jpg]

Assess this!

With the mad rush to cram all kinds of information into our students’ heads before MAP testing, I thought it might be important to think of some other, less threatening ways to assess our students’ learning.

Emmet Rosenfeld wrote a blog post on formative assessment.  Like its summative step-brother, it can tell a teacher where a student is in his/her development.  However, formative assessment can do so much more and can be a vital part of a student-centered classroom.

Rosenfeld identifies some key characteristics of formative assessment that make its value quite clear…

1. It’s ongoing. Kids don’t always know it’s happening; and teachers aren’t always trying to distill it to a number.
2. It’s dialogic. Evaluation is characterized by dialogue; standards are often negotiated, rather than handed down. The discussion about value is as important as the assigning of value; and even that is a task frequently done by self- and peer-assessment.
3. There is a feedback loop. The teacher often assumes a coaching role. Low-risk practice leads to perfect.
4. It’s metacognitive. Self-reflection is cultivated so that a learner can understand how he learned, not just what was learned. Every student becomes their own teacher.

For more on formative assessment, read Rosenfeld’s blog, Eduholic.

We-Blog, You Blog

Ruth did a nice job presenting classroom communication Wednesday night. However, it was too bad that Edublogs did not want to cooperate. I just wanted to supplement a few of the issues and key points brought up in Ruth’s session.

Blogging is something near and dear to my heart as some of you have gathered. I am an avid blogger and have had some success with this tool in the classroom. In researching a conference presentation I’ve found many, many examples of blogs that support good learning. The interactive and literacy possibilities are unlimited. I don’t want our struggles Wednesday night to discourage us from using blogs as a classroom tool.

The safety issue can’t be stressed enough. All this means is make sure you’re able to monitor what your students post, whether that be posts or comments. Also, having kids post in anonymity is essential. Using initials, first names only, or screen names are easy ways to accomplish this.

Some teachers expressed that they would like to see some other blogs that have been successfully used in classrooms. Like I mentioned before, I have found several examples while researching for my conference presentation that could better demonstrate the effectiveness of the blog. Check this link which is a list of classroom blogs that demonstrate various approaches to blogging.

Also, Yvonne shared with me some great ideas for making blogs work in the real classroom. One option could be to limit the number of students blogging to a few each day so as not to overload the system. Then, the rest of the class could comment on what a few students have to say. Another idea Yvonne had was to simply make links on your websites to student papers. This doesn’t supply the interactivity that a blog does through comments, but it does make it possible to publish student work online.

There are plenty of other resources and ideas out there on blogging. As you know, I love to use and tout my delicious account. This link has a list of the resources I used to prepare my presentation on blogging. You can also read the blog set up for my presentation (that I was unable to use due to a death in the family). Also, this link will take you to a list of ten ways you can use a blog in the classroom.

One other thing…It suddenly occurred to me the other evening how an RSS feed could be utilized in the classroom. When students set up their own blogs, subscribe to those blogs and have the students also subscribe to blogs, requiring them to read and comment on what their peers were writing. The virtual conversations that take place can extend the learning well beyond the time you have in class. You can use Bloglines, but I use my Google account to set up a reader.

Whatever you do, don’t give up on blogging yet. I think it is the most interactive and revolutionary tool of Web 2.0. Let me know on your classroom visits if you want me to help you set up your own blog. In the meantime, read some blogs and make up your own mind.

More Online Tools

I thought I’d take some time and share a few online resources that are free. (I bet that got your attention.)

In keeping with our last module (Tools for Thinking), the first resource is bubbl.us. This website allows you or your students to create webs and brainstorm online. You can save and share this work on bubbl.us, print it out, or even embed it onto your website or blog. It’s very easy to use and is somewhat similar to the mapping software with which we have already worked.

Quizlet is a vocabulary tool that when used for good (and not evil) can greatly enhance vocabulary skills in any and all subject areas. There are flashcard tools, instant quizzes, and (eMINTS friendly) collaborative tools. Think of the collaborative All you have to do is enter or upload your vocabulary list and let the kids go to work.

ClassTools.net allows for teachers personalize flash games, graphic organizers, and lesson templates all for free! This tool gives a teacher plenty of opportunities to create interactive learning activities that take the content to new levels.

Click here for full screen version

More Creating & Editing Digital Images

After Monday’s training session, I felt that there were some holes in the content and instruction I provided. In keeping with the purpose of this blog which is to supplement your trainings, I am providing the following links for you refer as you prepare your images for our website building day.

For basic information about Adobe Fireworks, go here. You can check for updates as well as search the help topics. The help portion of the website as well as online manuals can be accessed here. Boston College has made a useful tutorial website complete with basic instructions and screen shots. Just click here. The secrets behind the vector and bitmap images can be easily explained in Sue Chastain’s article on the subject here. SmartWebby provides some useful tips and tricks at this location. SmartWebby also provides some fantastic design tutorials here. There are also some video tutorials at this site where you can sign up for a free thirty-day trial.

I know that some of you have not had the opportunity to search for right clip art for your sites. Remember that my boss (Stephanie Bengston) has a vast list of resources that should now be filter-proof…at least in Wellsville.

In the meantime, keep working on your images and graphics. They will be needed for next Wednesday’s all-day session.

Image Conscious

As many of you begin collecting images and clip art for your classroom websites, there are a few places you can look for unique images that can really enhance the look and feel of your sites.

The first place to look is in your own classrooms.  Digital photos of your classrooms and student projects can give your websites a personal touch.  You may also scan student artwork.  When we work with altering images, we can edit these peices to be more functional elements of your websites.

Another place to look is Wikimedia.  This site comes from the same people who brought you Wikipedia, but it offers various media that are open to the public for free use.  The images on Wikimedia are under the classification of “public domain”, so users can publish the images with proper credit given.  The best place to search for images is in the “Commons” area.

Another great source for original images is .  You can use Fickr in a couple of ways.  First of all, you could join Flickr for free and post your own images or pictures for easy access anywhere.  Another useful feature of Flickr is that you can ask the actual photgrapher if you can use his/her photos for your site.  I’ve done this with some blog posts and people have been very willing to share.

(Snowmen in Moscow image courtesy of http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Snowmen_moscow.jpg.)

Techlearning, Warlick, and PDtoGo

In case you all hadn’t figured it out, I am a huge proponent of the blog, or web-log.  I’ve come across several blogs that I think are worth your time.  Check them out and let me know how helpful they really are.

While I have been checking my Google Reader today, I have noticed that the blog Techlearning has been very busy lately.  They have provided several articles with helpful hints and resources.  One article provides a video tutorial for inserting pictures into shapes on PowerPoint.  Another lists resources created by the federal government intended for free use by educators.  There are also articles (like this one) that help make the connection between using technology and the web in constructivist classrooms.  Techlearning is a site with which every eMINTS teacher should become familiar.

Another blog to keep an eye on is edtech guru David Warlick’s 2 ¢ Worth.  A recent post by Warlick describes statistics he discovered on the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).  The NCES has a “Kids Zone” that…

…provides information to help you learn about schools; decide on a college; find a public library; engage in several games, quizzes and skill building about math, probability, graphing, and mathematicians; and to learn many interesting facts about education.

Apparently the graphing tool is pretty cool.

The third resource blog I pay regular attention to is PDtoGo’s SMART Board podcasts.  Ben Hazzard and Joan Badger provide an entertaining  yet informational program on constructivist-based applications for the SMART Board.  There are often free SMART Notebook files to download at the blog.  I often listen to the podcasts on my way to Wellsville as a way to productively use that time.

Google Docs

Ruth and I have been collaborating using Google Docs in preparation for our training session in a week. Docs has allowed us to contribute and edit the same document without me having to make an extra trip to Wellsville. On Friday, we used Skype to talk while editing the document.

Ruth introduced me to Google Docs awhile back by sharing this video. Enjoy.