The conference was AMAZING!  We had just under 200 people. (Read below to learn why that is impressive.)  We have already discussed changes for next year’s conference.  We hope you will consider joining us.  Check RMWP.ORG for updates.

This conference schedule is a thing of great beauty.  You can now also download the conference program.

When I first started planning for this conference, I was told to expect around 30 people to show up.  As of today we have about 152 registered.  I am amazed at the support.  I have never done this before.  It has been eye-opening.If you are interested in hearing Kylene Beers and Bob Probst along with 12 other presenters speak, I would encourage you to come on down, over, or up to Birmingham, Alabama on Saturday (27 February 2010).Here is a link to the page where you can register: 21st Century Literacies Conference(I will remove the option to register at 11:59 p.m. the night before the conference.)

I purchased a copy of Janet Allen’s Inside Words this summer at a workshop. Among the AMAZING activities in the book I discovered the Frayer Method. (Click HERE to see a demonstration of the Frayer method with vocabulary).

When I saw it, I immediately thought of how useful it would be to use this to teach voice/style within your students’ writing. If you had them fill out a graphic organizer like the one used with vocabulary above, you could really get them thinking about their own writing.

Then I started thinking about how useful it would be in teaching the differences between the literary periods I teach (everything from romanticism to modernism). Because the influence of these period is often subtle and lacking a strict definition, this will certainly be useful for me next year.

Anyway…this post was more for me than my readers. Just thought I’d share, though.

Here are some PDF worksheets that feature the Frayer methods:

What is the Frayer method?

Frayer Vocabluary PDF

I do a lot of “writing into the day” with my sixth graders. They keep a notebook full of writing that either begin with a prompt I give them, or freewriting, or something connected to the lesson plan of the day. I want them to explore their inner worlds with this kind of writing that won’t get graded for grammar or punctuation — they can follow their thoughts and focus in on content, not mechanics (in their notebooks).

I often have them writing short stories and to help, I have them generate class lists of possible story titles. What they come up with is always amusing to all of us, and many can’t wait to get started telling a story from one of the titles.

Here is a list from a recent brainstorming session:

Adventures of Billy Bob and Joey Jane

Attack of the French Toast

The Story of the Chocolately Chocolate Bar

The One-armed Lunatic

Homework Trouble

The Thing Outside My House

Mr. Coyote Doesn’t Have a Home

Don’t Go By the Apple Tree

Moose

Homerun Kid

The Day I Rode My Bike to School

Purple

Rabbits Versus Hares

Fire-breathing Butterflies and Acid-spitting Unicorns

Popcorn Fight

Shattered

Don’t Sniff Dirty Socks
Lonely Souls

The Talking Book

Mrs. Mallory

Room 319

The Hole

The Day of Bad Luck

Pencil Sharpener Horror

Slimy Soup

A Night in the Light

The Polar Bear That Lived in the Rain Forest

The Hybrid of Doom

The Weird Man

The Freaky Robot

The Story of the Lost Abutment

The Virus

Alien Potatoes

Evil Lunch Room Food

The Blue Pool

A Hole in the Moon

OMG

The Day My Eyes Popped Out of My Head

Reading People’s Minds

The Day My Cat Turned Purple

Anti-Mad-Eye

My Mom Kidnapped My Math Teacher

Who Says Pigs Can’t Fly?

The Striped Pig Who Walked Down My Street

Goodbye, McFartalot

Miranda’s Birthday

Space Invasion
Don’t Look in your Sandwich

Cheese Gone Bad

The Dairy Section

Unread

The Red Ruby

The Day Polar Bears Took Over the World

It Came … From Day Care

Beneath the Church

The Road to Nowhere

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream for I-scream

Independent Forever

Dark Swamp

Camp Hornhock

The Day My Spit Turned Purple

The Boy Who Ate His Mom

When Computers Go Mad

Ripples in the Water

Gnomes in the Shower

LOL

Which story would you write?

– Kevin

When I was in college I strolled into the bookstore and picked up a notebook for my class and headed to the classroom. Once the professor entered I flipped it open to find that the first page was defective. The margin line ( which is usually just an inch or so from the left side of the page) was about 4 inches from the left (as seen in the picture to the right). I flipped through the notebook to find that the whole thing was defective. Now planning to return it, I closed the it. In doing so I discovered that I hadn’t bought a college ruled notebook; rather, I had purchased a law ruled notebook.

Over the semester, I found that it was the greatest notebook ever! I found it to be very useful for organizing notes. (To experience law ruled paper, just print it from pritablepaper.net (which is explained in this post).

FOR LITERATURE: To the left of the red line I would write character names, page numbers, or dates. To the right of the red line I would write details from the text, professor commentary, or personal commentary.

FOR PAPERS: I would write my drafts of paragraphs or of outlines to the right of the red line. To the left I would write notes to myself for changes. (I know you can do that on typical lined paper, but with this paper you have more room to make more significant/substantial changes.)

FOR MATH: Because I am a why guy (I need to know why things work the way they work), I needed to take notes on problems demonstrated in class to the right of the red line and explain to myself why I did certain operations to the left of the red line. This helped me when I was studying in the wee ours of the morning after the logic portion of my brain had gone to sleep.

OTHER USES:

• Vocabulary study guide (just fold it back and your have a study tool).
• Words and definitions
• A page to keep up with assignments you’ve had throughout the semester.
• Have your students take tests on it so you can comment on their performance.
• Since I am sure you can come up with a million more uses, I will stop the list here.

Please feel free to leave other suggestions in the comments below.

Part 2 of this blog can be found here.

Let me begin by saying that doing this is time consuming. It will require about 10 hours of your own time. However, you will quickly see that it save so much more time than that once implemented.

Over the past few weeks I have been working on getting all of my students (98 in all) blogging. There have been inquiries into student access to computers; and there have been hours devoted to figuring out how I would manage all of these blogs; but most importantly, there have been sleepless nights pondering the safety of my students. I started by having parents sign a form giving permission for their student to create a blog. Then I created a blog of my own. Then I walked them through both making their own and adding my blog to their reading list. You can read more about these steps below.

First, I created my form:

Get your own - Open publication

This form (as you can see when you click on it) explains how to set a blog up in the first place. I did that so that my students who know their way around the keyboard would go ahead and create theirs. Then, they become my helpers in the classroom. And, as you have probably found, it doesn’t really matter how computer savvy the teacher is. Once you show them something, they take it and make it ten times better.

I gave them a week to bring the signed permission slips back to me. Then we spent the week with the computers. However, each day I had a literature-relevant prompt to get them writing.

IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOUR SUBMERGE YOUR STUDENTS IN THE BLOGGING PROCESS AT THE BEGINNING.
Here is why:
1.) They are more likely to remember their passwords later if they are submerged in it.
2.) They become attached to it because they get time to personalize it.
3.) They immediately begin getting feedback from their peers.
4.) Then they immediately realized that they are writing for an audience that expects quality writing.
5.) All the kinks will get worked out in the submersion period (I will list a few I discovered below).

IT IS IMPORTANT TO LET THEM HAVE THEIR OWN VOICE
Give them content relevant prompts, but also allow them to express themselves about other topics. (You can see a list of prompts for younger students and another set for older students in the links embedded in this sentence.)

IT IS IMPORTANT THAT THEY EMAIL YOU THEIR USERNAME AND BLOG URL
Be sure to do this. When you have all of their emails, it save a lot of time. I went through and “followed” my students’ blogs once they followed mine. However, because they couldn’t use their real names, I didn’t always know who each blog belonged to until they each emailed me their URL and username. Then, I went to the dashboard of my google reader (which comes with the blogs made at blogger.com) and searched for each students’ blog address. Once I found it, I quickly changed their username as it appeared in my google reader to their real name. That helps when you are trying to give a grade for blog posts.

IT IS IMPORTANT THEY ARE ENCOURAGED (FORCED) TO INTERACT
Forcing them to comment on other students’ blogs will open the dialogue they need to 1.) feel like they are writers, 2.) know that they have an audience, and 3.) open dialogue that forces them to use academic language in “regular” conversation. They would not use this type of language with friends on facebook, but they would use it in the typical college classroom or English class.

ESTABLISH RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
Make sure you have a discussion about appropriate conversations via the internet. I know I have had a number of near altercations from students who were quick to whip out unacceptable commentary in emails to me. Expect that they will do that to their peers as well because it will happen if you don’t talk about it from the start.

MAKE THEM ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR POSTS
*BE SURE to have them mark the setting for comments that force the owner of the blog to screen the comments. Then it is the owner’s fault if something inappropriate gets posted. That will make each blogger your front line of defense.
*If you don’t have an iphone or blackberry, and you don’t want to grade while walking the halls, then you can have your students print out their posts (with their comments) to turn in to you.
*Tell them that they must post by a certain date and time for it to count. Most students will be able to post from their cell phones, so they can do it on the bus or math class (no offense, math teachers).

To create an account via blogger (or blogspot), students need their own email address. If they already have an gmail account, they are good to go. If they have their own email address (that is not a gmail account) they CAN just use that.If they need an email account, but you worry about them having their own, check out this post written a while back by Kevin (the post is also referenced in the comments below). However, you may find that guerillamail.com may not work with some blogging sites.

This morning I stumbled across an interesting site that showcased a fun little study guide that anyone can build in about an hour. The plus side to this is that you get to teach/learn a little about circuitry in the process. For students who are a little more interested in science, this might be a way to get them to become interested in vocabulary, math or history.

You could even do this with:
grammar rules
vocabulary
chronology in stories
character traits
chemistry: elements
formulas
science vocabulary
science facts
math equations
math formulas
history time lines
history definitions
historic figures

Check it out:

This week’s project combines some rudimentary circuitry and any subject your child needs a little extra practice in. I would file this with my “Better Than Worksheets” instructional series on drill and practice had I ever created such a series.

The word circuit is obviously historically related to the word circle. Webster’s 1828 defines it thus:

The act of moving or passing round; as the periodical circuit of the earth round the sun, or of the moon round the earth.

Modern technology may have brought some more specific application to the world, but the meaning has not changed much. Circuitry allows electricity to travel around in a circle to do work. Here, we are going to make a simple circuit board that can serve to allow your child to practice any skill that can be answered in a yes/no or multiple choice format. In this case, it will be multiplying by four.

Materials:

file folder (with the open edge trimmed so both sides are th same size and shape)
hole punch
marker
masking tape
aluminum foil
circuit tester

1. Punch holes. You will need two rows of holes. One for each question and one for each answer.

2. Write the problems along one side and the possible answers on the other.

3. Open the folder. On the back side of the side you wrote the problems and solutions, lay a strip of foil between a problem and the correct answer. This is the basis of your circuit board. Fold the ends over the hole and make sure the hole is completely covered by the foil. Insulate with masking tape. Make sure none of the foil is showing on the back side.

4. Continue until all the answers are connected to their problems by a strip of aluminum foil insulated by masking tape. The back will look kind of messy, but that is ok. No one will see it, anyway.

5. Close the file folder. We do a set of problems on each flap, make the circuit board and then tape the folder closed. This helps protect the work.

6. Use the circuit tester to work the problems:

Oops. The circuit was not completed, so the tester did not light up. Try again!

Yeah! She got the problem right, the circuit was completed and the tester lit up.

Caution: When you look for a circuit tester, some contain lead. These are not intended as children’s toys. We searched and found one without lead, but still require our daughter to wash her hands after using it.

THIS POST WAS TAKEN FROM PRINCIPLEDDISCOVERY.COM, A SITE ABOUT HOMESCHOOLING.

In an effort to raise the bar on my tests, I have sought to make my questions more like those found on AP tests.  I want my students to learn in preparation for the tests, but I also want them to learn FROM the tests.  However, the problem I am experiencing is a lack of knowledge of academic vocabulary.

ACADEMIC VOCABULARY
By academic vocabulary I do not mean words you would likely encounter at each grade level (which is mostly what I get when I google “academic vocabulary”). Rather, I mean the vocabulary test-makers use to craft the questions. Those verbs are what often trip students on such assessments. Since they were difficult to find, I decided to add some of the good stuff I found here on this page.

This list comes from the English Companion (by Jim Burke). It is a list of 350+/- words that one might encounter on an assessment. (Even teachers looking for new words to use in objectives on their lesson plans should check these out.) I don’t think it would be a problem to start off 1st graders on many of these words. What a great list! Thanks Jim Burke!

Test Practice sites (worth your time and for all content areas):
The College Board, which created the AP curriculum, I think, provides some well written free response questions that could easily be adapted for the lower level grades.

Here is a GREAT site for teaching students how to preform at the AP and Pre-AP levels. It has a lot of great links. I will definitely be putting this on my bookmark toolbar!

Of course, I cannot leave out WebEnglishTeacher.com out of the mix. At this link you will find ALL things English. This particular link just deals with AP, but just check out their home page for more great materials on just about anything.

For those looking for practice tests on a variety of subjects, you should check out THIS site. By looking at it, it was created a long time ago, but if you click enough times, you will find some really useful test practice materials. Again, I will say that half of the 100 or so sites do not work, but those that do seem pretty good.
This is for the writing assessment used in Florida called the FCAT (Otownteacher, this might interest you). Click on the drop down menu at the BOTTOM of the page to get a curriculum teaching elementary students how to break down the prompts. The test practice is broken down into weeks. After looking at them, I have found that they would be applicable to all states.

During my Master’s program, I was introduced to an up-and-coming teaching approach called UDL (Universal Design for Learning). This concept began in architecture, while designing infrastructure for people with disabilities. During this process, they discovered that those with disabilities were not the only people assisted by the designs. For example, when cut curbs were created, they were meant to aid people who are in wheelchairs cross the street. It was soon revealed that the smoother walkways also assisted those pushing strollers or delivery carts. So, while it helps support those with special needs, it was indeed universally successful. Fast forward to today- this same concept is being applied to education, with a technological twist. A Great Schools article by Nancy Firchow sums up the idea of UDL this way:

 ”UDL uses computer technology to create an educational environment that allows all students, including those with learning disabilities, to succeed in general education classrooms with minimal use of assistive technology (AT).”

It is guided by three principles,

• Multiple methods of presentation
• Multiple options for participation
• Multiple means of expression

While this is an extensive, pedogogy reforming approach to education, it is also a fantastic way to support every student in your classroom. It appears especially applicable to the ever-daunting Research Paper. With the guidance in UDL, students of all skill levels, reading proficiencies, mental/physical disabilities, and cultural backgrounds could access and manipulate the information required to perform grade level tasks. The catch here: teachers need to modify end goals to allow for the three principles. While a written product is the desired end result, those with difficulty in writing would have a built in support system. I have only scratched the surface of UDL, so please feel free to explore the following websites for an abundance of additional information.

http://www.cast.org/research/udl/index.html

http://www.washington.edu/doit/Faculty/Strategies/Universal/

http://www.greatschools.net/cgi-bin/showarticle/2490

If you have to teach kids how to pick out the main ideas of paragraphs or note taking skills, you may want to check out awesomehighlighter.com. 

DIRECTIONS:  All you have to do is 1.)go to the site

2.) type in the website address you want to mark up

3.) and click “highlight page.”

4.) hightlight and add notes as you wish.

5.) click DONE to get a url for your work and a list of everything you highlighted.

USES:

Use it to give instructions on how to use a website
Have students to a grammar technique scavenger hunt on their favorite sites
Teaching main ideas
Teaching researching methods
Teaching note-taking skills
You could put a paper on your website for students to highlight the errors
(if you have more ideas, leave them as comments)

AWESOME EXTRAS:
The great thing about this is you can pick different colors & you can even put a virtual sticky note on there. Then, students can just print out the marked up page when turning in the assignment.

***When you click done, it gives you the website address for a page that shows what you highlighted.  AND, it will even give you a list of all the thing s you highlighted.  In other words, it takes the notes for you!!!!!  (While that takes away from lessons about note taking skills, your reluctant students will enjoy the technology and ease.)

BEFORE YOU READ THIS:

If you do not know what a digital pen is, you can simply scroll down to the bullet points below (or click HERE to read about the Logitech Digital Pen). It writes just like a real pen, but it stores what you wrote so you can plug the pen into your computer  and upload it to a document.

MIDDLE AND HIGH SCHOOL

I have recently considered investing in a new piece of technology that would help with digital portfolios.  If you wanted to keep a catalog of a students’ mistakes, but did not want to double your workload, you could purchase one of these pens.  Once you finish writing in the margins you could save that data to add it to your digital portfolio (a word document for that student).

 ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

As you grade assessments that require a progression of improvement (i.e. spelling tests, etc.), you can make corrections in the margins that will later be uploaded to your computer from the pen.

IEP/SPECIAL ED. SUGGESTIONS:

You could also have students who have IEPs get notes from other students.  I guess this would be an expensive version of the carbon copy paper.

TIP (though I haven’t used one yet): I guess you would have to keep a pad  next to your stack of papers to write to jot down the name of each student as you begin grading their papers.  The reason is because when you upload the list of notations made by your digital pen, you wouldn’t know where one students paper began and another ended.  By reaching over and jotting down the name of the student each time (and drawing a line across the page, perhaps, you would be telling the pen to do the same on the document when you upload the data.

MORE INFO

For more information about this pen (there are many different versions out there), read the information below:

• What is it? You write with the pen in the notebook.  The pen has ink.  The notebook is real paper.  What’s new?  The pen uses an optical sensor to store everything you write.  Even once the pen is separated from the paper, it stores the pages you have written.  When you are ready to upload, you place the pen in it’s USB-linked cradle and it uploads in one click of the mouse.  Now everything that was written down is on your computer.
• Cost?  Retail is $149.95 for a pen and notebook.  Of course, you can find it for a little cheaper if you look around on the Internet.  You can get several sizes of notebooks.  I was able to purchase six standard-paper sized notebooks for under $25 after some digging.
• Technical Requirements?  Pen, cradle, notebook, io software.  This all comes packaged together.  To my knowledge, this product does not work on Macs.  The pen “package” does come with many ink cartridge refills.  I used the pen for four months in six hours per week of class before it needed a refill.
• How could we use this technology in the hybrid or traditional classroom?  Every day that we meet for my hybrid (part Internet, part classroom) Intermediate Algebra class, a different student takes notes using the digital pen and notebook.  They take the notes with them, I take the pen with me and upload that day’s notes to the web site.  Very quickly, we established the rule that those students that have been absent are the ones that should step forward to be note-takers, since they get the greatest benefit.
• How could we use this technology in the online classroom?  If the technology gets cheaper, or the student could get many semesters of use out of the pen, we could use this technology to have students “show their work” for problems requiring sophisticated use of notation or graphs.
• How could we use this technology in our professional lives?  The obvious use of this setup is for those folks who are not trained to create graphs or equations using a computer, but need to be able to communicate such figures using a computer.  You can attach the jpg file to an email and send your response to a question quite quickly.
• Wish list for this technology?   I would like an easier way to convert from the proprietary .pen files to pdf files.  Right now the conversion is .pen to .jpg (using the pen software) to .pdf using Adobe Acrobat Standard.  A cheaper setup cost would also be great to get mass use for students in online math classes.  Also pen software that works with Macs would be a plus.

(The bottom half of this article was taken from THIS site.  To read more click HERE, which is where the picture above was found.)

Wordle is an interesting application that takes whatever text you feed it and turns it into a variety of different kind of word clouds. It can also resort your tags if you use Delicious or even the tag words from a weblog. The results are interesting and Wordle allows you to resort the cloud or change the format and/or color of the words and the background to a number of possibilities.

I took Ben’s last post about VisuWords and put his text into Wordle. Here is what came out:

 

Then, I took this blog site and gave the RSS feed to Wordle and it spit out:

 

 

I love how the word “students” dominates everything. And this identification of words and themes is one way that a teacher might use Wordle with students. Perhaps a student could take one of their pieces of writing, put it into Wordle and analyze what comes out. Or, as someone showed me recently, you can take a famous poem, add the text to Wordle, and then have students guess which poem it is by looking at the words in the visual rearrangement.

 

And now, the hack tip: You can save your Wordles to the gallery at their site but if you want to share it on a blog, or save it as a file, you need to do a screen save. On a PC, you can use the “print-screen” key, go into MS Paint, paste it and then save as a .jpeg file. Then, you can upload it into your blog or photo sharing site (such as Flickr) I’m not sure about Mac — maybe someone could share that hack via the comment on this post.

 

In an event, Wordle is a fun and interesting way to re-organize your words.

– Kevin

 

 

Okay…so, what does that mean for you? It means having students write their thoughts instead of speaking them, which is, as we all know, an important skill when one depends on the internet/email to communicate. Below I give a very basic explanation of how it works and how you can use Firefly in your classroom.

HOW IT WORKS

When you visit a firefly-enabled website, you can click anywhere on the site and start typing. When you do, a bubble will pop up with whatever you are saying. Pretty interesting.

 

WAYS IT CAN BE USED IN THE CLASSROOM

1. Have your students look at different documents. Set a timer and do virtual stations. Each time the timer sounds, students would go to a different virtual station (or page of your website) to discuss via firefly.
2. You could anonymously post various students’ work for critique. Then they can print screen when they are done.
3. Put pictures of various advertisements your website and have students evaluate it for bias and/or method of using propaganda.
4. Have students do something like a word cluster.

I like this site because it allows for quiet evaluation of materials while giving a the assignment an edgy feel.

I would love to hear from you regarding ideas for using firefly.