Back at it?

Wow! I was just sitting in Chipotle thinking I should start a Blog only to find out that I already had one set up and in place from a class I took sever years ago? Anyway, instead of a new blog, I guess welcome to a continuation of my ramblings...

So today, I am attending a Tools for Teachers event where teachers with a valid ID from their schools can come get classroom supplies for their students. God bless those who organized it! It makes me feel good! To top it off, Chipotle (my favorite) gave teachers free lunch to boot!

Here's the thing! The event was scheduled from 11-2. I arrived at noon to find the vast majority of supplies gone. One of the organizers told me teachers were lined up at 10!!

That gets me angry! What gets me angry is that teachers are so underfunded (I'm not complaining about teacher salaries here, I'm talking about actual supplies for our classrooms) that: 1) we have to go to giveaway events like this and 2) everything went so quickly. I was able to grab a few notebooks so I can have PAPER to GIVE to those who need it. I also grabbed PENCILS to GIVE to students who need it. I know I'm not alone. If not all, the VAST majority of these materials will simply be GIVEN away, by teachers, to students. If we couldn't get those supplies free, we'd buy them ourselves to give to students. There's no school supply fairy to give this stuff to kids or teachers. In fact, at least in my district many teachers are taking home LESS money than in previous years and each year, often several times a year, we hear about MORE cuts coming while folks bitch about teachers always asking for MORE!

All of this is indicative of some pretty messed up societal ills.

Final Thoughts on CEP 811

As my CEP 811 course is coming to a close, I look back and think about the whirlwind of learning that took place in the last 8 weeks. My brain may still be spinning, but the three biggest things that stick out thus far are: WebQuests, StAIRs, and creating web sites.

WebQuests- I've been searching for a higher tech, project way to wrap up units for a while now. As an English teacher, I've been used to the typical research essay and/or presentation thing for a while now, but many of my students, especially those who do not plan on going to college, would (and many have) just as soon take a 0% and fail the course than write a paper. I have also had students simply copy and paste information from Wikipedia directly onto their paper, which also results in a 0%. That's not to say there's no longer any value in this teaching the students to research and create something at the end of the unit, but, I needed something else. WebQuests seem like a very viable alternative. The students still have to research and work, but the end result is something different and, at least for now, the novelty is attractive. I'm really excited about applying what I learned in this class and building on that base and using WebQuests in my class as a way to wrap up units. My first experiment will be in a couple weeks. I'm going to assign the WebQuest I completed for this class on SE Hinton as a way to wrap up The Outsiders unit. Wish me luck.

StAIRs- I had some trouble wrapping my mind around StAIRs. As teachers, we want to be there and be involved when the students learn and many of use require proof that a student completed the assignment so we can evaluate it. StAIRs are, but definition, stand-alone. They are self-contained and give immediate feedback to the students without the teacher being the one to give that feedback (at least directly, after all, we did write the things). It's a bit difficult to "let go" and let the assignment, for lack of a better term, get a life of its own. Nonetheless, I see the value of these and am looking forward to experimenting with them in the future. At first, I think I will use them as supplements; if a student is having troubles grasping a concept a StAIR may be a great way to help him or her out.

Websites- As a whole I'm very hesitant to give a student answers when they have a questions. Instead, I typically tell them where to find information and have them figure it out themselves. For years, I've compiled lists of great websites I've found and, when a student asked me, I'd typically tell them 4 or 5 useful sites I've found, tell them to look at those and let me know if they still had trouble. After finding out how easy it actually is to make websites (for free) with programs like Weebly, I can now put those links together and give them one website instead of many. I'm pretty excited about that and have already started using this in my class with the Poage's English 2P website. Once I launched that a couple weeks ago, several students have already used it and I saw test scores rise among those who told me they used it. As the old saying goes, the proof is in the pudding! I'm definitely planing on building on that and continuing to use that as a resource for my students in the future.

As my brain winds down, I may think of other items I learned about in this class and experiment with those, but I'm looking forward to using these three and seeing how they evolve.

Thoughts on Online Teaching

For my CEP 811 class, I'm to look over various forms of online learning found in the Michigan Guideline for Online Teaching and discuss which ones may be useful to my students and peers. While the list itself is both daunting and exciting, I chose to discuss one that I have the most familiarity (keep in mind that I'm by no means an expert on this): WebQuests.

If you are curious about WebQuests, you can find a LOT of great information here. These are a great tool for not only explicit instruction, but also enriching classroom instruction by giving students a chance to take what they learn and build on that base to learn something new. It's also a very wide-open tool which can be written and applied to many different learning styles and abilities. Aside from that, there are two aspects that make WebQuests accessible to most teachers in a classroom setting: it's free and easy. With some research and a little time, every teacher can do a WebQuest to help their students! My first attempt at writing a WebQuest myself is a study S. E. Hinton and here works. This employs a lot of visual learning and critical thinking skills to discover similarities and themes across her different works. I may tweak it some before I assign it to my students, but the original version of it is here. Please take a look at it and let me know what you think.

Now on to a technology which I think would be harder to implement and use. While it's almost impossible to argue its usefulness and necessity, I'm sticking with "harder to use" here and sayt Assistive Technologies and Devices along with Universal Design for Learning. Again, I cannot stress enough how useful this can be, but most teachers have very little to say about how their districts allocate money. These devices can be very pricey and it may be hard to justify equipping a population of students with these tools when only a few students (if any) are legally required to have them under the Americans with Disabilities Act. It's a shame, but we often have to blend "what should be" with "what is."

StAIR Final Revision

One of the things we've learned a lot about in my CEP 811 is the use of StAIRs (Stand Alone Instructional Resources). Since I don't like doing things in class (learning) that I can't readily apply to my class (teaching) I did one on "Julius Caesar" by William Shakespeare. It took a lot of work and a lot of research, but I think I put the finishing touches on it. So ladies and gentlemen... make a drum roll noise. Seriously... make the noise! C'm'on! I could be learning some crazy programming that uses the mics in your computers to sense drum roll noises, you don't know. Man! How hard is it to play along! Fine then! Oh well, you're loss. It would've been cool, but you'll never know. Here it is.

"Julius Caesar" Speech Analysis StAIR

I also uploaded this to www.merlot.org in case others teachers would like to use this. Here is the link to that.

Wiki Lab

This week, we're learning about Wikis. It's pretty interesting to see how easily a group of people can collaborate and create something new. Admittedly, I was shy about these at first because anyone can easily edit them. While that's part of the greatness of them, I also like to know that when I'm reading about something, I can trust the authority of what I'm reading. It's a mixed bag I suppose and the bottom line is it's the reader's responsibility to cross-reference sources, especially if something doesn't seem to make sense (e.g. if you read that Thomas Edison never died, became a vampire and worked extensively on the invention of Twizzlers, you may want to... nevermind. I'd buy that.).

Nonetheless, I was given of looking at the Wikipedia page for the school where I teach and either adding something new or correcting something that was mistaken. I did both. I noticed that, while our principal was listed, our vice principal wasn't. I added him. I also noticed that the man listed at athletic director is now the principal of our middle school and we have a new athletic director. I updated that information as well. Here's a shot of my handiwork to the right.

I'm also given the task of creating my own Wiki. Admittedly, I'm still learning about Wikis and how to use them to their full potential in my class, but to start off, I decided to use it as a repository for all the links I suggest to students to help them understand what's going on in class. I invite anyone (especially those who are familiar with Julius Caesar or Shakespeare in general to add links to sites they've found useful. You can find that website here.

Evaluating a lesson for UDL

I was recently given the task of evaluating a recent lesson plan I submitted for my CEP 811 class in terms of UDL (Universal Design for Learning). When looking at this lesson and evaluating it with the UDL criteria, I noticed several aspects, both positive and negative, that I had not previously seen. In addition to using this lesson for my class (as a student), I'm also experimenting with this lesson in my class (as a teacher). While it's very easy for a teacher to go back, adjust and sometimes restructure lessons "on the fly," it made it a little difficult to go back and see the lesson, prior to reading my instructor's original comments, quite a few of which I implemented, and prior to the experimentation and adjustments I've made while teaching something in a completely new way, to look at it as it was originally and evaluate it without thinking "oh yeah! I decided to do that" and overlooking something that was originally a barrier. That being said, I think I was successful in that part of the task and also saw some things I can implement in the lesson as I'm teaching it now. There are also some items I saw as barriers that may not directly apply to my class (teaching) that are still barriers to the Universal Design. Hopefully I caught these as well. Without further ado, here it is.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I cordially invite you to check out my

UDL Checklist for the Eng 3P Huckleberry Finn/Scratch Project.

Enjoy.

Next up is to re-write the lesson suggesting ways I can remove the barriers I found. Wish me luck.

WebQuest Evaluation

After a long day of study, I opted to do an evaluation of a WebQuest of something not for my class, but something that has interested me independently of my class (OK maybe something I could use or adapt to my class someday), the Beat Generation. Luckily, after a quick search, I was able to find WebQuest: The Beat Movement. Let the good times roll! For the sake of simplicity, I opted to place the areas of evaluation in bold with my responses below them in plain text.

Synopsis of the WebQuest including its intended audience, its educational goals, and the curriculum standards addressed if stated.

This WebQuest is a study of the Beat Generation of the 1950s along with how those writers and the topics which they discussed are still relevant today. It's written for English Language Arts classes from grades 9-12. While no content standards were explicitly mentioned, there are several which could easily apply to this lesson.

What pedagogical strategies are employed in the WebQuest and are they effective? Is there use of metaphor? Are they using inductive or deductive strategies? Is there scaffolding? What other strategies do you see?  

This WebQuest makes use of both inductive and deductive instruction by introducing students briefly to the Beat Generation and some of it's major figures (Ginsberg, Kerouac, Burroughs), then giving students free reign to explore various authors and works of that time period. In the end, students will be responsible for a literary analysis of a major, a biographical sketch of its author along with a collaborative performance of an original work inspired by the piece.

In what ways is the WebQuest taking advantage of technology? In what ways is it 'change without difference'? Could this WebQuest be done just as well by photocopying pages and handing them out to students?

Many of the resources required to complete the task are digital (Youtube videos), along with the tools needed to complete the performance aspect of the assignment, but also relies heavily on hand-outs previously given and can be exported to a Word or Pdf format. In short, while it could work by photocopying pages, it work not work nearly as well.

Technically, does it work? Does it have bugs or flaws such as broken links or images? Is the material out of date? Does it credit its sources?

Everything seems sound and all the links work. Citations could be clearer, especially for the pictures.

How would you improve the WebQuest?

I would like to have seen more resources on the content itself. The tutorial videos dealt only with the software they'd be using. 

On a side note, after some research, I found a complete documentary on the Beat Generation here.