Taking the Time to Blog

Since winter break I have struggled to post to my blog. The words did not flow from me and felt forced; as a result blogging and ultimately reflecting felt like a chore.

I think that I was simply out of practice. As I allowed other tasks to fill the time I had been using to reflect, I fell more and more out of my rhythm and each subsequent post became less and less frequent. The downward spiral had begun.

I was still really good at coming up with ideas to blog about and I saved them as a draft post. Right now I have 45 ready to be completed. I hope I can remember what I wanted to say.

When the new school year starts in August and I find out what my schedule is, the first thing I am going to do is to take one period a week and block it off. I am going to use that period for reflection and writing.

Relax, They Can Do It

After moving from teaching grades 3-4 to grades 1-2 this year, I was unsure of what the students would be able to do.

I got into the classroom and I felt a little uneasy.

I felt off balance.

I put on the kid gloves and began the year.

We used a lot of paper. We painted. We cut. We did things you would expect a [1995] lower elementary class to do. Sure, we went to the computer lab, but I was not pushing them to explore technology.

Then I signed up for COETAIL and to complete my assignments I had to push my students into areas I did not think they were ready for.

We dove into using Google Apps, I had them logging into different accounts, researching, finding answers to their own questions, finding answers to my questions, and learning new ways to express ourselves.

Photo Credit: mariandy_gizfel via Compfight cc

I thought about how far my class has come this year today when one of my students asked me what roly polys eat. (A roly poly is also known as a pill bug or a wood louse. It rolls up into a ball when it gets frightened. See the picture to the left.) For the past week or so, several of my students have been spending their time making a roly poly town.

Town in the making

When they came in after building, one student asked what roly polys eat. Since I had no idea, I got the iPads and passed them out.

I wrote the question on the board and asked the students what they thought roly polys might eat. I wrote each response on the board. Then I told them to go ahead and find out what roly polys eat.

It only took a few minutes for one boy to come up to me and show me what he found. He got the answer off of a wiki answers site. Other students were right there with him. Several of the students (and it was interesting because it was mostly girls) used Image Search. They found the answer too, but they did not know it.

This brought forth a whole new set of questions about its habitat, if they would survive in the structure they built for it, and where its mouth is.

I sat there amazed at how much they can do, and how much we will do next year.

Poem

We learned a lot this year.
We learned we could have fun with a group of more than two,
We discovered a new sense of independence,
We found our voice and learned to communicate what we thought,
We learned that doing hard things can be fun,
We found new ways to connect and new ways to find information,
We surprised our teacher by what we could do,
We learned to take risks and we pushed ourselves outside of our comfort zone,
We learned that the times when we thought we would not have fun, we could,
We found that being under the lights can be scary, but we can do it,
And we found out that everyone in the class and learn, and sometimes the oldest one in the room will learn the most.

"It was hard, but fun."

For our current unit about ecosystems and rice, I had the students make a presentation using Google Slides that we will print and put together as a book.

I made the slides for the students. I put the titles on them and asked them to find a picture for each one. I then showed the students my example book that I made, with the same slides as they had, and I showed them how to locate legal images through Google Slides and showed how to cite their sources.

Most students caught on quickly to this. One of the hardest parts for them, which is hard for any new user to Google Slides, is the way the invisible boxes work. Many of them got stuck when they tried to select their text, but an invisible text box was covering it up and they could not do anything.

The next step for them was to add text. This unit I used some paper books I got from Scholastic and the idea was to use that as a guide.

Of course there were some students who got stuck with this too. Before we started I put the students into teams to help each other, but some students got so focused on what they were doing, it was hard to pull themselves away. So for those who needed the help, I gave them some cloze sentences.

This book is from one first grader who erased all the slides I made. After he finished I saw that not all the citations made it to the slides.





When I asked the students after they had printed their books if they liked doing this, they said they did, and one student said, "It was hard, but fun."

Another student taught me that you can adjust the transparency of the color of the text box. That was a lot better than the way I was doing it [and the way I showed them]. I had told them to I can learn too you know.

Break it down
While I saw a lot of good tech and design learning happening (not to mention great peer mentoring), it took several class periods to finish. This was at a time when many were being taken with school functions. It got me thinking about what I should have done.

I could have broke this down more for them. Instead of saying, "Here we go, do this", I could have done one slide a week in the unit.

Week 1 - cover page and a breakdown of the central idea
Week 2 - slide/page on plant parts
Week 3 - page about the plant life cycle
Week 4 - page about animal life cycle
Week 5 - page about rice field food web
Week 6 - page about how rice gets from field to table

I imagine the book being the assessment of what we learned. If we worked on it midweek, I could also use it as a formative assessment.

Could the summative assessment be ongoing like this?