Mr Hammerlund

Note: This started this post intending to write about something else, but these thoughts came out. Note 2: Today I read this post . This looked like something out of the Wizard of Oz.  When I first read that Google Reader was being shut down, I was not too worried. After thinking about it, I started to get worried about the other Google services I rely on. It was not too long ago that my starting page on my browser was iGoogle.com. I am still sore about that being discontinued. As a side note, I was thinking about it, and here is the Google services I use and their replacements. Sites -- Wikispaces Blogger -- Wordpress Docs -- MS Word :( Drive -- Dropbox Gmail -- Yahoo Mail YouTube -- Vimio? Products I Would Like Video Search Tonight I was watching a long video. I was not interested in watching the whole 45-minute clip, and I found myself clicking ahead on the time bar at the bottom of the video player. Then I thought, it would really ...

Today we ventured into fractionland. I usually do random pairings, but today I paired my students up into teams and gave them some Play Dough. Then I gave them 5 minutes to mess around with it. I then them to make five balls with their allotment. The balls were their dango , a kind of Japanese snack. And I told them to share the five dango evenly between them. I got this problem from a book recommended to me , Teaching Student Centered Mathematics: Grades K-3 . The first question from my students was whether they could tear them apart to which I said they could do whatever they wanted. One bright girl asked for the plastic knife I was holding onto for a later demonstration. Thinking that her observation was worth a reward, I gave her the knife. I wish I had found enough knives for each group before hand, I had tried but there weren't any in the kitchen, because after each group had ripped their dango into two, their instinct was to roll the small part they had just to...

What We Haven't Learned About Learning This chapter made me uncomfortable to read. I found myself cringing when some of the common, but poor, teaching practices were brought into question since I have used them. The first part of the chapter deals with time; or rather, a lack of it. And yes, I always feel like I do not have enough time in class to do what I want to do. I try not to be a taskmaster having the students work on things under a gun. When we write, I give them two days (two periods) to go from the brainstorming stage to the final product. I really enjoy watching my students talk to each other about their writing or walk up to the whiteboard together to figure out how to spell something. When helping another student spell, I heard, "Sound it out. What sounds do you hear?" (This is all a part of an unfinished post.) * I also don't like to force them to write at least ~ sentences/pages. When I blog, do I always write at least ~ sentences/pages? I do howev...

The Homework Myth - Chapter 5 The Questions Left Unasked I started this chapter thinking that section two would be something I would want to skip over, since I have the feeling that this is the part of the book where Kohn will present arguments for homework and show why they do not make sense. He has been doing that through the first four chapters already. However, I like this quote on page 87, it was inspired by Robert Frost: Too many of us, including some who work in the field of education seem to have lost our capacity to be outraged by the outrageous; when handed foolish and destructive mandates, we respond by asking for guidance on how to best carry them out. Kohn goes on to talk about the "hidden curriculum";  students are taught to sit still and listen to what the teacher says, and in doing so gain rewards (88). I am writing these notes as I read, so he may or may not talk about his later on, but I teach my students to sit still and listen not because what I...

This chapter is all about how researchers misuse of data whether it be someone else's or their own. While reading this chapter I began to question everything. When Kohn wrote about how researchers ignore evidence and misrepresent their own made me want to research some of his citations. Unfortunately looking through Google books, the two citations I really wanted to check, Classroom Instruction That Works Research-Based Strategies for Increasing Student Achievement and Harris Cooper's  The Battle Over Homework: Common ground for administrators, teachers, and parents , are both listed with limited text available. Not that I am doubting what he is saying, but it would be interesting to see how accurate his research is. In Chapter 4, Kohn sets up his argument for the rest of the book by pointing to several reasons to give homework (72) A disregard for research findings, sometimes even on the part of researchers A reluctance to ask challenging questions about common prac...

Did I really put this book down for a month? Now that I have some time, I am going to try to read a chapter a day for this week. That will put me right around finishing up next week. Chapter Three - Does Homework Provide Nonacademic Benefits? In my own practice, in addition to reinforcing or practicing what has been learned at school, I have thought of the traits of responsibility, time-management, independence, among others as reasons I have justified assigning homework. Who wouldn't want to our kids to develop into adults with these traits? Kohn presents the arguments for homework as: Homework shows the parents what the students are learning at school Parents helping their children with homework helps parents demonstrate their interest in their child's' learning Homework has character-building potential Kohn counters with: Homework can be confusing for parents as well as the students Parents can show an interest in their child's education throug...

self-aware self-conscious: aware of yourself as an individual or of your own being and actions and thoughts; "self-conscious awareness";... wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn As a wrap-up to our unit on Light and Color , I invited a middle-school student to teach my class about pointillism, which was the subject of her art project. To prepare for her visit tomorrow, I brought my class to the computer lab to look for some pictures we could color. [caption id="attachment_71" align="alignright" width="240"] Self Aware Robotics by The Rocketeer [/caption] As I was going through the search process with my students, I thought of how far they had come in a short time. I thought of how much my perception of what they were capable of doing had changed. I meant to get my students started learning how to search at the beginning of the year, but for various reasons, I did not. Since signing up for COETAIL, I have started to push my class forward...

I originally wanted to be a high school history teacher when I thought about teaching. I thought it would suit me. Today I had a chance to observe a high school history lesson as a part of our internal professional development. The lesson was about why maps change. It started with some questions to check for understanding - the lower-level Bloom's stuff then moved into an activity where the students were comparing and contrasting maps on paper. At the end of class, the map was beamed up onto the whiteboard and the students annotated it using whiteboard markers. Then it had to be erased for the next map. I suggested that the teacher try using Google Drawings for a lesson like this next time. The class could have been broken up into groups with each student at his or her own computer. The map could be shared with the students and they could all be working on the same map at the same time. Another way to do it would be to have two maps shared with members of each team. Each...

Color Cycle  by  Karthikeyan A K Accessed from  OpenClipArt.org In an attempt to better help my students, I have been thinking a lot about how I use the Internet. I am thinking while I am tweaking a photo. When I first started using the Internet, I mainly used it for email. I then moved to being an information and news junkie. I also started using the Internet to find guitar tabs, and to make them. A few years ago I bought a DSLR camera and I needed to learn how to use it. As I didn't have anyone I could talk to face to face, I learned everything I know now about photography online. I have learned through a variety of blogs, forums, and videos. So most of what I have gathered I have had to read. I have to raise the bar on what my students can read [both on and off line] and I need to bring them up to a level where they are comfortable gathering information online. I think I need to do weekly search sessions. Maybe I can have my students do one search ses...

I was thinking of a way my students could present the information they gathered about the nocturnal animals we researched. At first I considered using Kidpix, but then I remembered that we have Haiku Deck on our iPads. I had never used Haiku Deck, but when I looked at it, I was immediately drawn to the pictures [from Flickr] you can use. Once they learned where the buttons were, Haiku Deck was easy for the students to use. Not only did the students make great presentations with it, but we also had some great discussions while making them. Presentation slides have titles as well and they should be in larger font The fewer the words the better You do not want to cover up the picture with text The animal they researched does not have to be on each slide Citing work is "a way of saying thank you" -  Jeff Utecht There were others which I forgot, but it was fun to do this with my class.  The best part of all of this was that some of them went home and downloaded H...

"What is Freedom?" I was asked the above question this morning. My first thought was, "You are in second grade.Your life is freedom!" Then I asked, "Do you know what free means?" "You mean doesn't cost anything?" "No, the other free. Like you have choices." "Oh! You mean like free time?" Yeah, it's kind of like free time.

This is my course 1 final project as it stands now. I have already started the process, and I can see that finding information is a challenge for my students, so I just made a custom search engine for them. It is an easy process. Simply go to google.com/cse and insert the webpages you want the students to search. The hard part for me was finding a place to put it. I decided on using our class Google account to take advantage of iGoogle until it is shut down in a few weeks. One of the goals of this lesson is to have the students learn how to search better. As they are in first and second grades it is more of teaching them search for the first time so I want them to get started on the right foot. This is a different era from where I started with the Internet directories. Anyway, this is just a draft, so all comments are welcome.

One of the first activities I did with my students in our current unit, Light and Color , was to have them sort different objects. My idea was to have them be sorted by opaque, translucent, and transparent objects. As with any good sort, they came up with categories I did not even think of. Tuning In through Sorting Objects I love sorting activities just for that reason. I never know what will become of it.

Have (and if so, how have) teaching and learning changed with the introduction of new tools? Grigorovich M-5 aircraft (front view)  by  liftarn Last summer I read the book The Wright Brothers: The Remarkable Story of the Aviation Pioneers who Changed the World . It is a great read and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants a glimpse into the turn of the twentieth century. The book tells the story of how the Wright Brothers started their career by starting a newspaper. At that time in the United States, there were independent printers on every block. Many of these were muckrakers and sensationalist publications . Soon though, newspapers started to consolidate. Being a consumer became the norm. I can see parallels between the early days of the newspapers, and the Internet as it stands now. Already we see up and coming sites being taken over by larger, more established sites. Hotel Icon Has Internet In Room  by  Gerald_G There are differ...

I am one of the teacher advisers for the school's student council. Our student council has students in grades 5-6 up through high school. A few years ago we experimented with having students in the grade 3-4 class join, but that lasted one year. FreeHand ROSES by  aungkarns Every year we sell roses to the entire school community. The ordering process starts with a [paper] letter sent home with a [paper] order form. The students and staff then bring back the order forms and they go into either of the teacher advisers' boxes. Then the orders need to be tallied, sorted, and the money collected needs to be checked. This year the letter to be sent home was sent out late. We were not going to make the flower shop's ordering deadline so we needed to estimate what people might order by looking at last year's order. I picked the flowers up from the flower shop the evening before we were to pass them out. We counted them the following day and i t turned out that the ...