Year: 2010 (page 8 of 20)

September 26, 2010 / 1 Comment

A different way to do parent-teacher interviews

We started a different way to do parent teacher interviews this year and upon reflection, I love it. Let me describe last year. We started with a very brief introduction to our DP and MYP programs, then sent the parents around on a wild night where they rushed through every single teacher in their schedule and got to hear our quick introduction to what our course is and then sent them off on their way without a single one of us getting to chat at all.

This year we did something totally different. We spent half an hour in the first session with the advisors and really went through a lot of detail about general expectations of the school. We took the time to listen to the parents’ concerns and questions. Next each teacher joined into groups based on their main specialty and the parents got the opportunity to walk around the school. I ended up in the Math and Science teacher room with some of my colleagues and we waited around. Parents then moved from room to room and chose which teachers they wanted to chat with. None of the conversations were terribly private so we discussed generalities and arranged appointments for more private conversations when we felt they were necessary.

Parents didn’t feel like they were rushed and teachers didn’t feel like they needed to give parents information that the parents could have just as easily read. The whole evening felt a lot more like a real opportunity to mix and mingle with parents, while still providing parents with the choice to visit specific teachers. It worked.

In a few weeks we are going to host our student led conferences for our MYP students. Right after those conferences we’ll send home letters to the parents where teachers will specifically request interviews with parents that we feel like we need to see. In other words, we’ll never have to sit down and have an unnecessary conversation with a parent in a typical parent-teacher interview night.

September 25, 2010 / 1 Comment

How can you use sound in your classroom?

Here are some ideas for using sound in your classroom to help your students understand concepts through another of their senses.

In Math:

There’s a fun experiment you can do with students where you bounce a ball and they watch the ball bouncing and try and measure the height of the ball as it reaches the tops of its bounce. Graph the number of the bounce versus the height of the bounce and you have an example of exponential decay. Unfortunately the results you get from students tend to look like straight lines because of the enormous potential for error in measurement.

Here’s another way to collect the data. Set up a sound recorder in your classroom. I used my iPhone but a laptop with a Mic would work. Ideally anything that can record sound in a digital format should work. Now turn on the recorder and bounce the ball close enough to the recorder that it can pick up the sound of the ball bouncing but not so close it gets damaged. Stop the recording when the ball stops bouncing. Now you open up the audio recording with an audio editor, like Audacity for example, and take a look at the recorded audio.

Audacity editing

(listen to the sound of this ball bouncing here)

You can see from the image above that the bounces are really obvious in the recording. If you click on each bounce Audacity happily reports it’s time position in the recording to a very high level of accuracy, and to determine the amount of time between bounces, you can just subtract the time positions of any two adjacent bounces. Graph the number of the bounce versus the time until the next bounce and you’ll still get a nice exponential decay function which was the whole point of the original experiment but now your experimental error is much smaller.

In English:

Want to provide all of your students with feedback about their essays but didn’t feel like you have the time? Annoyed that all they do is check the actual grade instead of your valuable feedback?

Why not record your feedback in audio instead of writing it down? You can talk much faster than you can write and you can put the numerical grade (if you feel like you need it) into the recording itself so your students will listen to your feedback to find out what their grade. You’ll be making your feedback more useful and faster to create.

In Moodle there is a plugin which is very useful for this called Nanogong. It allows you to embed audio recordings in any of the text fields which means you can add an audio recording when you are providing feedback for your student’s online assignments.

If you have students who struggle with the written word, have them speak aloud their ideas and record the audio. They can then transcribe what they have spoken and use it in their writing. There are some useful programs for doing the transcriptions, like the Dragon Speaking Naturally app for the iPhone. They could also call a Google Voice number and leave a voice message which will be transcribed for them. In both cases there will be lots of editing work to do after they have the audio transcribed.

In a Second Language:

Besides the obvious, listening to lots of the language in many different contexts (music, radio, talk shows, etc…) have your students record themselves speaking sentences and then listen to what they sound like. Have them compare the words they are saying to what the words should sound like. Rinse and repeat. Students can then practice their pronunciation on their own without as much direct feedback from the teacher.

It also worth noting here that an actual conversation with someone in that second language is possible (and probably more desirable) through programs like Skype. Check out Around the World with 80 schools as a good place to get started connecting your classroom to the rest of the world. You may also want to see the iEARN project for global connections.

In the Humanities:

You could have students listen to a historical speech. For example you could have students listen to the actual audio from Martin Luther King Jr’s famous "I have a Dream" speech. Students might recognize that when they listen to the entire speech that his message is slightly different than the version which is highly abridged. Have students create their own "historical" speeches that might have been from different famous figures from through out history or alternatively have kids act out historical figures in a podcast play.

Have students listen to folk music from around the world through the Folkways website. They could then take their own folk music and create their own recordings and share them with their peers. Through this medium they can learn part of what the differences are between people from around the world, but more importantly our similarities.

In Science:

Here’s an idea: have students record notes played on one of their musical instruments. Try and record every note from middle A to an octave higher. View the recorded notes in a tool known as an oscilloscope (try this Oscilloscope you can use on your Windows computer). Now students can actually measure the frequency of the sounds they are listening too and see a relationship between the music they like to listen to and play and that stuff about waves you were trying to teach them.

Want to teach students about the Doppler effect? How about a demonstration using a portable sound recorder, someone running around (with the recorder) and a loud sound maker of some sort, ideally something that makes a sustained pitch. Students will be able to hear the difference in the sounds as the person passes by the sound maker. This might be even better down with a video recording of the person moving timed to match the audio recording taken by the person.

Summary

Although most of these ideas involve some technology, I think that you can see that many of them can be replicated fairly easily. Want to give your students feedback about their essay? Talk to them in private. Want to connect your students to speakers of the second language they are learning? Invite them to your classroom. The point is to try and connect your students to what they are learning and to try and engage more of their senses.

September 21, 2010 / 0 Comments

Post your positive experiences about school here

NBC has a new section of their Education Nation website asking people to their negative experiences about schooling. This lacks journalistic integrity in my opinion. The typical person when faced with a bunch of negative stories will assume that there are many other negative stories just like the above. The effect of this collection of negative stories by NBC will be to demonize teachers and school administrators and portray all schools as failing when in fact most educators work extremely hard and the majority of schools are successful.

So I ask you to stand up to the NBC manipulation of the public and share your positive stories about school. Things you know would not have happened without the assistance of a kind teacher, or an excellent administrator. Share your stories of schools where the kids are excited to learn and where you have seen good things happen.

I’ll start the ball rolling.

I went to a medium sized public middle school in Courtenay, BC. One of the things that school had was an excellent arts and drama program. I was lucky enough to be part of the musical theatre course. All through my schooling I learned about how to perform in front of crowds, how to be part of a theatrical team, and how to project self-confidence. Without this training, I would not have the self-confidence that I do today, in fact I probably wouldn’t have become a teacher.

What’s your positive story?

September 20, 2010 / 0 Comments

What’s missing?

Bill Gates thinks that a video with a nameless person showing math concepts is the future of education. He’s wrong. Here’s why.

In that video there is something missing. Some major feature of learning that is completely missing from all 1800 of the videos up on the Khan Academy website.

Do you know what it is? Of course you do!

Kids! None of the videos has kids asking questions about what is happening in the video. You can pause the video, fast forward it, rewind it to re-watch the video, but you can’t ask it any questions. The ability to ask questions is a critical part of the learning process.

You can still use these videos as part of your classroom because your students can pause the video, bring you over, and say "hunh?" They can ask questions. Until the student can ask questions of the video, it will never replace a classroom teacher; the best it can do is support good instruction.

September 20, 2010 / 2 Comments

Differentiating in Math Class Using Online Videos

I told my colleagues about the Khan Academy last week. They thought the idea of being able to access all these resources was incredibly cool.

One of them today built his entire lesson around the Khan Academy videos. You see he has a class with a very wide range of abilities. Some of the students know nothing about exponents, some of them know a tonne already. So he found all of the Khan Academy videos that related to the rules of exponents, organized them in order of difficulty and content area, then shared his list with his students through Moodle. The idea is that the kids get to start with the curriculum that they need rather than the curriculum which comes first in the book. It’s a great way to turn one teacher into 15.

When the students finish their video and feel that they have absorbed enough information, they were instructed to come back to my colleague and ask any questions they had and find out what problems from the text would be best for them to do. Here’s where my colleague discovered a flaw. After about 15 minutes, which is the length of one video, he suddenly had 22 8th graders asking him for problems. Wooops. Now he’s setting up the problem exercises in advance. It will blow his mind when I show him that he can use something like http://thatquiz.org to automatically give the students feedback on their problems as well…

September 20, 2010 / 0 Comments

Observations about the Pre-Internet generation

I’ve noticed some things about a few people I know in the Pre-Internet generation. Just sharing my thoughts here and wondering how we can help them. Note that these generalizations don’t apply to everyone in this generation, but almost never apply at all to anyone outside of it.

They often double click when they should single click
They single click when they should double click
They drag stuff around by accident because they forget to release the mouse before they move it again
They don’t scan the entire screen and look for instructions so they often have to repeat entering information on a form
They don’t keep track of multiple windows or tabs very easily
Each program looks completely different to them, they haven’t learned the commonalities of their programs
They find technology frustrating and slow, to them it is hardly ever reliable
They want to hide their lack of knowledge of technology
They generally don’t know the language of technology, icons, arrows, and other common notation is lost on them

Does this remind you of anyone you know? How can we help them? I can imagine it must be very frustrating to be in a technology rich world and not know how to use a lot of it, especially when it seems like every week there is something new you have to add to your repertoire of skills.

September 20, 2010 / 0 Comments

Resources for International Day of Peace

Here is a collection of resources I am building so my staff can talk about the International Day of Peace tomorrow. Hope they are useful.

5000 years of religion in 90 seconds (from here).

An interactive map which shows many of the conflicts between 1900 and 2004.

http://nobelprize.org/educational/peace/conflictmap/conflictmap.html

Lists of conflicts in recorded human history

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_wars

Note: You can add up the number of years we have been at war simply by taking the time to add up all of the wars listed on the previous page. This could be a great activity for your students.

Things you can do with your students

Check out this broadcast of events around the world celebrating world peace.

http://www.un.org/en/events/peaceday/2010/broadcast.shtml

Talk about the relationship between religion & conflict. Think of other reasons why conflict occurs. How could we be proactive in preventing some of these reasons from occurring.

Look at other activities you can do with your students here:

http://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/calendar-activities/today-international-peace-20296.html

Sing along to Imagine by John Lennon

September 19, 2010 / 0 Comments

What is the minimum number of facts needed to memorize the multiplication table?

If you look at a 10 by 10 multiplication table, you’d think there were 100 facts that need to be memorized.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

1. First important fact is that the order we multiply numbers doesn’t change the answer. So let’s remove all of the unnecessary facts to memorize because we can just remember this rule instead.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

Now we only have 55 facts to memorize. That’s a lot less than 100. I’m willing to bet that most people know this already.

2. We should take advantage of the fact that one times anything is the anything. That will remove 10 more facts from the table.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

3. And of course we should note that ten times anything and you just add a zero (which in later years should be changed to move the decimal place once students are aware a decimal place exists).

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

4. There is a great trick that is used in Stand and Deliver which can eliminate the nine times column. I couldn’t find the original clip from the movie, but here’s the same trick with a bit more explanation than he gave in the movie.

Let’s then cut out the nines times column from the table and look at what’s left.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

5, 6. The two times column and the five times column are just adding by twos and adding by fives, both of which are skills kids should have mastered by the time they are learning multiplication. If they haven’t mastered repeated addition, I would recommend pausing here and having them master it before learning multiplication.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

7, 8, 9, 10. We can also make multiplication by 6, 7, 8, and 9 much easier using the following tricks shown in the movie clip below. This works out to about 4 things to remember to be able to do this trick because of the complexity of this trick.

Now let’s look at what’s left to memorize.

X	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
1	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10
2	2	4	6	8	10	12	14	16	18	20
3	3	6	9	12	15	18	21	24	27	30
4	4	8	12	16	20	24	28	32	36	40
5	5	10	15	20	25	30	35	40	45	50
6	6	12	18	24	30	36	42	48	54	60
7	7	14	21	28	35	42	49	56	63	70
8	8	16	24	32	40	48	56	64	72	80
9	9	18	27	36	45	54	63	72	81	90
10	10	20	30	40	50	60	70	80	90	100

So now students only have 3 multiplications to remember. Even better, all of these are fairly small numbers so that if they get stuck, they can just count it out using repeated addition. For those of you keeping track, this means we can reduce the entire multiplication table to just 13 total facts to remember. Not bad!

References:

http://www.dadsworksheets.com/v1/Strategies/eight_rules_of_multiplication.html

http://www.redshift.com/~bonajo/mmathmult.htm

September 18, 2010 / 0 Comments

Why I love my school

Last night I witnessed something which I really feel is a critical component of why our school works so well. 10 teachers sat around a table and ate together and openly discussed our recent MYP camp.

There were no accusations of blame or discussion of which teachers may have not pulled their weight; there was just an open discussion on how can we improve this camp. In about a 30 minute discussion, the group had outlined the successes of the camp and the failures of the camp. In about another 20 minutes, they had analyzed and categorized the successes and failures and come up with solutions to the problems that they saw.

They should have gone home to their families and rested, after all they were all tired. They could have decided to wait until later to discuss the issues. "Let’s hold off and wait until our meeting on Tuesday to discuss this," they could have said. Instead, they sat down in their dirty and smelly camp clothes and discussed improvements to the camp for an hour, almost immediately after the last child was safely on their way home with their parents.

It is this kind of commitment to our organization and to what we do which has made my school so much fun to work at. I love working with a group of people who are fully committed to what they do and in which everyone pulls their weight.

September 16, 2010 / 0 Comments

What is a Learning Specialist in Technology?

This year I started a new job at my school. My official title is "Learning Specialist: Information Technology" which is a bit of a mouthful so I feel like I need to describe what I do in order to explain what the title means. I also have some freedom to write my job description because of how new the position is to my school.

My job involves multiple aspects, the most important of which is to turn our school into one which uses technology efficiently and effectively in our instruction and in our general organization of the school. So overall that means I’ll have multiple responsibilities within the school given the enormity of the task ahead of me.

First, I see my position as a professional development position. It is my job to help the staff improve their use of technology, to be thoughtful about how technology is used, and to incorporate technology more seamlessly into their practice. I’m going to do this through small group instruction, 1 on 1 tutoring sessions, training videos, sharing of resources & links, and occasionally whole group sessions. I’ll also share outside opportunities for my staff to learn how to use technology; this could take the form of webinars, tweet-ups, or conferences at other schools.

I’ll also need to continue my research about the use of technology. Twitter has been a great source of information in this regard, but I’m going to have to continue to expand my professional learning network and find other sources of information. I’m particularly interested in finding more people locally who use technologies in their schools so I can observe what they do in practice. I’ll also end up being the point person in my school when organizations want to talk to us about their products.

I’m going to explore technologies and look at what the market has to offer. We are currently looking into an eReader and pricing options for textbooks for example. I’m interested in accessories which could make some of our teacher’s lives easier. I won a free USB microscope which looks like it could be a great addition to our science department. I’m playing with the InFocus projector I won at ISTE. These technologies are something our school would otherwise not get to play without my involvement.

I still teach this year. I have two diploma program Math classes on my schedule. It is important that I use technology in my own practice with these students. Partially this is so I keep my practices current, partially it is so I can experiment with different ideas, and partially it is so I keep a connection to the students in the school. Some of the students don’t even know who I am, even in our small school, because I’m out of the classroom so much. The danger with me being pulled out of the classroom completely is that my teaching practice may stagnate and without some professional experience to draw upon, it will be hypocritical of me to be training staff in new technologies that I haven’t even used yet!

I’m looking forward to this year and I suspect that as the year goes on that what I do my modify and change. Perhaps the school will decide that their investment hasn’t been worthwhile, or perhaps I’ll be moved out of the classroom completely when our school expands to its full size. Who knows? In the meantime, I’m enjoying what I do.

Year: 2010 (page 8 of 20)

A different way to do parent-teacher interviews