Activboard Quick Activity

During Terra Nova test days, the morning is dedicated to administering the test and the afternoon has abbreviated rotations of specials. Since I teach computer class, I am in the afternoon rotation with thirty minute class periods.

What To Do - Grade 4-8
I really didn't want the students to have an open choice of program and I really want to give them a break after tests all morning. I decided to turn to my Activboard and Activotes. I want the students engaged. I was looking for a fun project and decided to go to the Lesson section on Promethean Planet.

I found an illusions flip chart called Tricks of the Eye by Lisa Dubemar. It has an interesting set of optical illusions. Some I had seen, some are new to me. She had a nice opening exercise with pennies, cups, and partners, but I skipped to the illusions and added some more of my own from the NIEHS Kid Page. NIEHS stands for the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.

How Did It Go?
I had 4th, 6th, and 8th grade students. They were all engaged in the examples, voting for their choice, and seeing how they compared with the students sitting nearby. The half hour few by. I arranged the room in a horseshoe of chairs around the Activboard.

This could really be accomplished with a PowerPoint or Keynote set of slides containing the images. Students could have white paper and pens to hold up their answers or could answer via SurveyMonkey or Poll Everywhere.

Potential Updates to the Questions
Instead of having an A and B choice, the students seemed to want and A, B, Both, or I Can't Tell set of options. I just told them to press C if they saw both images, or D if they couldn't see either.

Overall I was really happy with this little filler lesson and so were the students. Not a complaint was heard in the room.

Here are the slides I used with the students. The images are from the NIEHS Kids Page. As always, I struggle with using images. I believe these are fine to post under Fair Use guidelines. If the owner feels they need to be removed, please let me know and I will happily do so.

Actiboard/ Activote Illusions Slides

View more presentations from njtechteacher. (tags: powerpoint illusions)

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Image Citation:
"optical illusion - pulsing vortex." ClintJCL's photostream. 2006 Oct 20. 2009 Mar 3.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/274762242/

Quick Surveys in Fourth and Fifth Grade

I have two different projects going on in the fourth and fifth grade. It was so simple to create a Survey Monkey questionnaire for use in our discussion. The students enjoyed the quick survey and it provided us with some interesting results.

The Fourth Grade
We are continuing to work on the Space Mission Patch project. The students completed their initial research on what was contained on each of the patches in the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. I wanted to quickly roll up which were the most popular patches. Last night I created a free one question survey. It was a simple "select one choice questionnaire".

Once the questionnaire was created, I posted the link to my school delicious account. The students are becoming quite adept in starting up Firefox, choosing the All Tags triangle, and selecting the fourth grade links to find the required website.

The results: The favorite patch in my first of two fourth grade classes was the Apollo 17 patch with 35.3% of the vote (6 votes). There was a tie for second with Apollo 11, 13, and Gemini 6 all receiving 11.8% of the vote (2 votes).

What We Did With the Results
We brought up each of the winning patches, I had them point out the details and try to decide why NASA included those details for those patches. We looked at which patches used Roman numbers for the mission number.

Next Steps
I gave out a simple research project to compare some of Earth's statistics with another planet. They took a worksheet to the computer to compare the diameter, high and low temperature, length of a day, length of a year, number of moons, and number of rings. They completed that research today using Windows to the Universe. They decided on a name for their ship. The missions are the Angel missions for our parish's patron saint, Saint Michael the Archangel.

The Fifth Grade
The fifth grade continues to work toward understanding Greenwich Mean Time. They learned to edit a wiki for the first time. I created a sand box area to have them edit the page and tell what GMT stood for, what it is used for, and how many hours difference there is between GMT and Eastern Daylight Time.

All but one student could tell me what the abbreviation of GMT meant. Most had a fair answer for what it is used for. They were still a bit shaky on the number of hours difference between GMT and our Eastern Daylight Time.

Survey Time
Next, we must begin gathering data for our partner classes to tell what happens during different times in the day for the Time Zone Experiences wiki. I was certain that the students all started and ended their days at different times and I wanted to be able to quickly see that information. Last night, I set up a quick, free seven question survey over on Survey Monkey. They navigated over from the fifth grade delicious links at the beginning of class to complete the survey.

Armed with our data, we are ready to begin personal bits of writing to explain what happens at different times of day in our part of the world.

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Image Citation
Comer, Clint. "Nap Time." Clintus McGintus' photostream. 2008 1 Oct. 2007 14 Jan.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/165/356600905_b07c509dca.jpg?v=0

Part I - Training Survey of New Teachers

Back on December 27th I put out a little call for help via the Twitter network. With the help of several extra eyes, I made some updates and put it to use this past week. Among my helpers were Patrick Higgins, Diane Cordell, susane, Chris Prout, Cyndi Danner-Kuhn, @lilhonda, @digitalmaverick, and @susant.

I introduced new teachers to the world of Internet collaboration. I’m going to post this over two or three blog entries as I have time over the next several days. It will stand as a reminder to myself when I present next year. It’s also another look at how to introduce the wide range of tools to new teachers.

Overall, I was very happy with the presentation. It was a 1:1 situation. I used a combination of show-and-tell, video “commercials”, and hands-on exploration. My intent was to engage the teachers after they had already endured a full day in their own classroom.

The alternate route program assists teachers in New Jersey get their state teacher certificate. I teach in a private school, so the certificate is not required. It took a very long time for me to complete the process. I had to get myself down to the county education office to fill out the paperwork, sign up for various tests, and then wait while the state department’s new computer chugged my paperwork through the system. After six years of teaching, I’m a fully certified K-5 classroom teacher and middle school math teacher – not just a provisionally certified teacher.

Last year I completed the class portion of the alternate route program. I had already passed the Praxis tests for both licenses. The class met once per week from September through June plus one Saturday per month. The program I attended was well worth my time. It reinforced a lot of learning I did on my own. There really isn’t a new teacher program at my school. I was lucky to have my former sixth grade teacher in this school who really mentored me and showed me the ropes. The alternate route program tied all the pieces together.

One of the classes was a technology class. It is just one evening in the myriad of sessions over the nine-month period. I was looking to learn all sorts of new ideas. In reality, it was not what I was looking for. I was asked to take over that class last summer and I really threw my heart into it.

All the learning I accomplished via the Internet over the last year has come into play. I had two and one half hours to give the teachers a window into what is possible. I called it Integrating Technology in Education. I knew that I couldn’t really “teach” much so instead I aimed to excite them with possibilities.

I also took the advice of Patrick Higgins and Diane Cordell. They said to “steer clear of showing them things they already to with technology added”, “draw parallels to real life situations”, and “make life easier, don’t just add another requirement to their lives”.

I think I managed to keep those thoughts in mind.

I started the class with a bit of hands on work. I told them my goal was three-fold. 1) To help them share what they already do 2) to help them find free professional development and 3) to show them some amazing work being done in classrooms today.

We started the journey via a set of delicious bookmarks I created for the session. I only gave them one sheet of paper (double sided) and told them as long as they could get to del.icio.us/ertc from a computer, they would be able to access everything we did that night.

From the delicious bookmark, we clicked on the survey set of tags and went to the link Teacher Survey for Start of Class. I spoke about how useful delicious is in carrying your bookmarks from one computer to the next. I discussed the fact that I use a delicious account for my students so I don’t have to keep bookmarking favorites. I also tried to get across the notion that I can share the links of other people who share my interests.

The survey was useful on several levels. First, it got them working on the computers right away. Second, it gave stragglers a chance to catch up and not interrupt the flow of class. Third, it showed one method of using the Internet with their students. Feel free to click on the link and take the survey if you want to try it out.

I have used SurveyMonkey with my fifth through eighth grade in a variety of situations. I showed the teachers how you can see the results as surveys are completed. We talked about the fact that the data could be used any class from the lowest grades up to high school.

In Tuesday’s class, one gentleman spoke about his work at a university in his “former life”. They used SurveyMonkey (paid for account) extensively. He mentioned that while the results are basic, they could be exported into Excel and even brought into SAS to really work the data.

We reviewed what the class already knew, as a whole. It also gave me a great heads up on the breakdown of grade levels for my group instruction.

Here are the survey results.

In my next post, I’ll discuss how we moved on to wikis.

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Image Citation:
"Thank you everyone!" J. Star's photostream. 3 March 2007. 9 February 2008.
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/172/409405305_bc2b90cb10_m.jpg

Surveys

At some point over the summer, I learned about Survey Monkey. I created a survey for the first day of class for sixth through eighth grade. I am planning on having the students collaborate across three classrooms on the topics of plagiarism, copyright, and Creative Commons.

One question I asked is specifically aimed at this topic. The results were interesting. The first set is 39 seventh grade responses. The second set is 21 eighth graders. All entirely unscientific in nature, but it does seem that most students just want people to look or listen to their work. An overwhelming number also don't have a feel for why they should worry about this. It will make a good follow-up after we go through the wiki project. I'd like to know if their feeling change.

Question: You may choose more than one answer. How should people be able to use YOUR content on the Internet (both what you create at school and outside of school)? They should be able to:

• only look or listen to it. (57.1% - 12 students)
  
• share, distribute, and remix it as long as they give you credit EVEN IF they make money from the new form (0%)
  
• share and distribute but NOT remix it as long as they give you credit EVEN IF they make money (4.8% - 1 student)
  
• share and distribute but NOT remix it as long as they give you credit AND don't make money from your work (9.5% - 2 students)
  
• share, distribute, and remix it as long as they give you credit AND don't make money from your work (9.5% - 2 students)
  
• share, distribute, and remix it as long as they give you credit AND don't make money from your work AND use the same rights that you've given others (9.5% - 2 students)
  
• share, distribute, and remix it as long as they give you credit AND use the same rights that you've given EVEN IF they make money from your (0%)
  
• Do I really have to worry about this? (42.9% -9 students)
  

• only look or listen to it. (61.5% - 21 students)
  
• share, distribute, and remix it as long as they give you credit EVEN IF they make money from the new form (15.4% - 6 students)
  
• share and distribute but NOT remix it as long as they give you credit EVEN IF they make money (5.1% - 2 students)
  
• share and distribute but NOT remix it as long as they give you credit AND don't make money from your work (5.1% - 2 students)
  
• share, distribute, and remix it as long as they give you credit AND don't make money from your work (7.7% - 3 students)
  
• share, distribute, and remix it as long as they give you credit AND don't make money from your work AND use the same rights that you've given others (10.3% - 4 students)
  
• share, distribute, and remix it as long as they give you credit AND use the same rights that you've given EVEN IF they make money from your (5.1% - 2 students)
  
• Do I really have to worry about this? (46.2% - 18 students)
  

I also surveyed their use of social bookmarks, social networks, wikis, blogs, RSS readers, and other tools. I think I will use SurveyMonkey again this year. One last interesting note:

Would you like your teachers to use an online survey like this in other classes?

Seventh Yes (65.8% - 25 students) No (34.2% - 13 students)
Eighth Yes (76.2% -16 students) No (23.8% - 5 students)

So, as a once or twice a year thing, it probably will be a useful tool.

Notice: Window to the Edublogger World

I was looking at the e-Learning Blog by Julie Lindsay and learned about an online conference. I wish I could do it, but I'm unavailable all day. I'll be out there living life, but I'll wish I had computer access. I'll just have to catch up with the trails left online. I also found an Edubloggerworld wiki and got access to make entries on the wiki. There is also a tagging standard set up for the conference. I'll probably make an entry the night before although you're supposed to create the entry on August 23. So check out Julie's link above for more information.

I'm getting close to the start of school and can't wait to put some new things into action. I've seen how much kids who use MySpace love surveys. So...I signed up for a free account at surveymonkey. I'll start the computer class off with a survey for grades five to eight. We'll use the data for creating charts to display on the walls. It'll make a quick display in time for Back to School night. I'll probably lead the math class to creating their own survey at some point during the first three weeks of school.

I'm still working through the final details on how I'm going to present the wiki and blogging to the sixth grade math class. All I know is that I want to use it for the kids to discuss math (blog) and keep track of the contents of each class (wiki). I read somewhere on Darren Kuropatwa's blog for his studen'ts about how many exposures it takes to really learn something. I'm hoping to give the students two extra avenues to reflect, review, and learn our math concepts. I also want it to be more than an electronic version of a paper activity. I want to reach the higher levels of learning on the continuum and look forward to getting them to think on a level that is higher than recall of facts.

Finally, I keep going over and over where I want to take the wikis in computer class. Last year, I almost used them as a survey machine. It got the kids used to editing the wiki. This year, I will probably have them collaborate with a "sister" class. In at least fifth, sixth, and seventh, there are two of each class. I'll be able to have them collaborate on the same topic. In this way, I can get them to use the discussion feature. I'm still deciding on the topics, but I want to generate analysis and the creation of something new. So, I keep searching for ideas on the web and thinking.