Too Much Tech On My Hands

I have been looking for great technology to use with my students for many years now. I have found some great software and websites that have enhanced my teaching and student learning. Some apps has made it easier for the students and more work for me, and I have found some apps have made it easier for students and less work for me.

What I have also found is the amount of products that are out there and how I have been trapped in the notion that I need to use as many as I can for the students. I don't think this is the case. We don't have to use as many programs that we can. We just need to use the ones that will enhance the student learning. There are so many different apps out there to use and many of them do the same thing. I heard about Spicynodes a few days ago and I started playing on it. It is a fun program. After I made a project on it I found that it is the same as using Xmind. My students use Xmind when mind mapping. It is easy and not web based, yet we can post the finished products on the web. It is also similar to Mind42, which is also a beautiful mind mapping program. What we use is what is best for us.

We do need to keep our eyes open for useful programs that can be used in our classrooms, but do we need everything we can get? I don't think so.

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Does a PLC reach across school boundaries?

We had a principal from another school visit us on a Learning Walk. There is a purpose for the Learning Walk and I think it is for the people coming to our school to learn about some of the things we are doing. I think this mint have been lost on this walk. When it was finished, we heard back about all the wrong things we were doing in our school. How we were not following the strict guidelines on the district on the curriculum map and how we we not using the right materials to teach.

First off, the guidelines are guidelines right? See How To Stay Up With The Curriculum on the editions website. We do the best we can, but we still teach kids. We are taught not to teach to the test, and yet, we are to teach the curriculum at the exact time everyone else is. It is great to have a map and a guideline of what and when to teach it, but some kids need a little more time here and a little less time there. That is the teachers guide to how fast to teach. Am I wrong here?

But the main point of this, for me, is the PLC aspect of it. If we are going to have a Professional Learning Community, we should find the best in the schools and spread it around. Each school should work at getting better by building a collaborative atmosphere and the district should follow suit by building a collaborative atmosphere among the schools. How can we collaborate with people that tear us down? Is competition good among schools academically or should we be working to raise everyone's skill level.

So how do we do this? How do we stop finding the bad in other schools and find the things that a good and try to incorporate them into our school?

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You Got Some Splaining To Do

Our Fifth Grade Team was asked to talk at a Title One meeting in Northern Utah. At first we looked at our schedules to see if that would be possible. Then we looked at what we were teaching to see what we would have to turn over to a substitute to teach. Some concepts are best to teach ourselves and, even though we have great subs, have the sub teach something else. We finally worked it out and we will be heading up on Friday. We will be talking about what we did to help our students do so well on the year end tests. There are so many things that we did and so many ideas we tried to get going last year that it would be hard to narrow them down

Our district Superintendent of Elementary Education visited with our school a couple of years ago and told us to "think out of the box". We were in the middle of the legislative time when our state lawmakers were deciding whether to take away days from the teachers to learn and prepare for the school year. He wanted us to do what we could to help our students with less money and less days to prepare our lessons in. So our school went to it and came up with a few things to change, morph, or get rid of. This was the start of what we did to help our students.

We looked at a few things to change in each subject in our grade level. We refined our lesson plans in Social Studies and put the lessons and activities on a wiki. Spelling became more of a focus and we added word sorts and Kagen Activities to help practice their words. Science was retooled and we took the lessons, added experiments and activities, and limited the lecturing where possible. Guests were invited to help teach the curriculum. Zion National Park Ranges aight about land forms and erosion while Discovery Gateway sent a presenter to show off experiments with matter. We wanted the students to have fun with what they were learning, but we made sure the learning was happening.

When we tested, we added two little things that made a big difference to the testing outcome. We tested in our own rooms to make the students feel comfortable and we made them explain their answers. We take all our year end test on computers. Testing in our rooms helped the students feel like they were taking another test in our rooms instead of taking the test in the computer lab where we visit once a week. We had parent volunteers sign up and get trained on the ethics of testing and on how to be in the testing environment and observe, but not help the students. Parents were not allowed to be the same rooms as their students.

Having the students explain their answers helped them focus to get the right answers. It made the students that hurry through the test slow down and have to think about why they answer the questions. We had them fold a paper into 32 squares and show their work in math or explain their answer in language and science. When the test finished, they turned in their scratch paper to the Escher to look over and then destroy. Students are allowed to u scratch paper on all tests, the paper just needs to be destroyed after the test.

These are not the end of what we will do the help our students succeed, but they are the start of our journey to helping these kids succeed.

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Reflections

So what did I do this year that I liked? Here are few of the ideas that we will keep.

PLC- I have loved the power we have working together. Our lessons have been better and more refined. The opportunity to hear other ideas helped me. I have become a better teacher because of it. I used to keep some of my ideas to myself so my class had a few extras, but that is not what teaching is about. I want others to see what I am doing and to use it if they want to. I also want everyone's ideas so I can get the best for my students. In a PLC team the students are not mine anymore but all the team students. We take credit and criticism for all that the students do or don't do. The year ending scores are a reflection of what the whole grade level does, not an individual teacher. We share students successes and failures. We share planning and lessons. We share activities and ideas. We share.

Computers- at the beginning of the tear we had a 2:1 ratio with our mini laptops. It was great to have the students working together to get work done. We have gone to 1:1 ratio and that has brought some great opportunities with testing, research, and writing. One thing I want to do more of next year is dropping assignment onto our Utips website. Utips is a state-run testing practice site that gives teachers a drop-box for students to drop assignments in instead of printing everything. This will help with our morning work.

Morning Work- We have used the 4 question bell work for years and it helps give us time to teach a language mini-lesson for grammar. We have used a single paper for each week and I would like to change that so we are checking the work over a period of time and not each week. We review all the questions each day and students are called "by the sticks" and they explain their answers. Turning them in is more of a formality rather than an assignment. I wonder if we could Morning Work into the breakfast club activity with the planner? Hmmm. We will talk about it.

Math- We will still use the math books for the work and practice. The Topic tests will be put on Utips to use less paper and for a better view of how the students do overall. When the students get a problem wrong on the test they will write the problem down in their math books and take them home to correct their work. Parents must sign the corrections and they come back to school. The math book will have notes about the topics we are working on and they can use that information to help correct their homework. One math book for notes and practice. They can use the book for the check-up to help prepare for the topic test.  The Periodic Test will always be on paper and students will have to show their work on a separate paper (Folded into the amount of boxes needed so each question has a box).

These are a few of the changes we incorporated this year. There are so many more to add for next year. There are so many good ideas out there.

What's your Motivation?

A parent came to the last Student Education Planning meeting of the year with me years ago. He asked me what I have been teaching his child for the year. I started to talk to him about the curriculum we had gone over and he smiled and stopped me. He said, "My child comes home everyday and I ask what was learned at school today and everyday the reply is, nothing." He went on to tell me that he knows that I taught him something because his child loved going to school and he appreciated what I had done for his child. He joked with me about how children are and that he felt his child had learned more than he was letting on.

I was reminded of this story as I read David Warlick's blog about the responsibility of learners. He talks about how we need to have a purpose to want to learn and there are three components to education we need to look at. 

My team was talking about the levels of students during our first year flexible grouping the students for Math and Language. Mark had noted that the middle group of students have the ability to be in the upper group except they are not motivated to do so. They understand the work, they get it done when we ask, they do the bare minimum and no more, and are the first to get out of the class when it is time. The lower and upper group does all their work, they stay in a little longer to get more help, they try to do more than is expected and they show improvement. So the difference between the top and the middle is how motivated the student is. 

As I look at these experiences, they are telling me that we need to motivate the middle group. How? I am working on that, but they need to have ownership and a need to do the work. They need to see that it is a benefit to them and will be in their life. Part of the motivation should come from the use of technology in the classroom. This has brought motivation to a few students and brought them to life in our classrooms.

The Three E's in Education

The three E's is a blog post from David Warlick on his CoLearners blog. I found it very interesting and enlightening that he would want to change the three R's to the three E's. He wants to change the three R's to Exposing information (Going beyond what is there, evaluating the information, organizing it, and decoding it), Employing information (adding value to the information that is there), Expressing ideas compellingly (producing a message that will attract and audience and communicate an idea). I am not sure that exposing is the right word to use, I would have used Evaluating instead. In elementary school we evaluate information to find out what it does for us and how we can use it in math, reading, and writing.

I see the students not relating to the basic of Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic in this world of technology and innovation. They are seeing innovations monthly and using most of them within a short period after they are presented. Students need to learn to Evaluate information, Employ that information, and Express that information to others in many different ways. How are we as teachers doing this? What can we do to not just teach information, but teach how to get it, evaluate it, and use it? This will be our challenge over the next generation.