Airliner Crash

So I was supposed to show my whole department how to use the airliners today but the bluetooth would not read itself and everything went sour. It solidified any ludite ideas about the problems of technology and was just a general waste of time for everyone else.

Let it be a learning experience.

Semester Projects--do differently next year

I am just now finishing grading the semester projects--not real bright of me to have them come in the last week before break and get finals on top of that. I wanted to remember a few things for next year so, here it goes:

• Have the projects come in the week before finals--not only for my sanity but many of the kids talked about not being able to study for finals because they were finishing the project. While they could have planned better, I know that they won't, so I'll just be the bad guy.

Problems with the concept

• sticking only to the books--make sure they recognize that they need to add to them and show how it shows their understaning of the world
• not creating something new--sticking images to make a powerpoint--would they put those words on a piece of paper and call it meaningful?
• no introduction or conclusion
• no transition pieces
• no directions
• form matching content--what is good for showing what. . .
• illustrations of scenes as opposed to represenational art
• poems about the books instead of the big ideas from the books--idea: take a line from the book and use it as the title of a poem; idea: concept
• citations--and not just at the end if it is artwork that is not yours--needs to be clear where each thing came from
• CD or flash drive should only be for multimedia--should be easy to follow and not have a semester's worth of work.
• raw material (interviews, film, spoken word) should be edited and polished

Document Camera Discoveries

Yesterday I used the document camera to ahve the kids share their annotations. For homework they had to do a close re-reading of 5 pages of their choice in Night. I had a volunteer start the discussion and then kids jumped up and added their comments with their own notes on the SmartBoard.

Problems to work out:
1) time to capture the pages--there must be a better way than the way I'm doing it--but I did have the kids re-read the passage that would be discussed while I captured the picture and saved it in the scratch pad--made them more prepared to discuss annotations

2) still working on how to get them into Smart Notebook pages--kids couldn't highlight and the 4 color pens on my Smart Board all kind look the same

3) pencil doesn't show up well. . . need to play with the settings to figure that out

Will be able to post these on website (upcoming. . . one day) so kids can see how others annotate their texts.

Starting a Blog

OK, so I'm starting this blog to see how it works. I eventually want to have this blog set up through my school website, but I can't seem to access my school website. Oh well. I'm curious to see how students use the blog and if it will be an effective way to assess what my students know and how much they understand. I don't want it to be graded, but I do want to see what they are thinking. We'll see. . .