December 27th, 2007 walkere
I haven’t been updating this blog lately because I’ve been busy working on a different project - Babel.
Babel is a general education and technology website. It’s got a growing collection of articles on methods, technology tutorials, and other topics and education and technology.
The best parts, though, are online tools that I coded myself. One is a user-driven lesson plan database. Teachers can log in and share their lesson plans, and they can also browse other people’s lesson plans. That one may take a while to get off the ground, until more people share their lessons.
The second tool is a Web Quest creation script. You can log in, type in some content, and the script creates a Web Quest for you. It comes with a complete interactive menu, and it is hosted for free on the teachbabel.com server.
Go on, check it out. You know you want it. Babel - Bringing Teachers Together.
Posted in Ramblings | 1 Comment »
October 22nd, 2007 walkere
Can’t think of a way to force your students to process information and utilize higher order thinking skills? Make them draw! By converting written words and thoughts into pictures, students are at least applying the knowledge and at best synthesizing it into something brand new.
A great method for Social Studies and Language Arts that uses this approach is called historical heads. What do you need? Knowledge of a person or group of people, a blank outline of a head (Blank Historical Head), and some creativity.
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October 19th, 2007 walkere
Looking for an electronic gradebook? I know I was.
In the first weeks of school, I’ve had dozens of students move on, off, or around my rosters. If I’d been using a pen and paper gradebook, it would be scribbled and erased half to death. Thankfully, from the first day I kept my main records on an electronic gradebook.
I first used Gradekeeper. It’s fairly useful and cheap. It had most of the functionality I wanted, but it didn’t leave me fully satisfied.
Then one day at school I found out that we had a site license to Easy Grade Pro. This was a more robust database program for tracking students’ grades and attendance. I love the program and there aren’t many tweaks that I would want to change. Check out my full review of Easy Grade Pro at AssociatedContent.com.
Some useful features include:
- Copying students and assignments directly from one class to another
- Saving custom data on students (i.e. addresses, phone numbers, parent names)
- An array of custom grade scores (missing, excused, absent, and plenty more)
- Thorough score reporting for individual students and entire classes
- Ability to curve individual assignments and override student grades
Check it out. It’s worth the money. If you’re district bought it for you, it’s even better.
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October 13th, 2007 walkere
The century after the Reformation was an extremely violent one in Europe. Protestants and Catholics completed unspeakable atrocities on each other. Wars raged for decades at a time.
The period is significant for both European History and US History. In the European context, the wars and the eventual peace (the Peace of Westphalia) created the basis of the modern state system. In the American context, religious violence and persecution encouraged many people to flee to the British and French colonies.
Check out this lesson plan on religious violence. It involves a good anticipatory set, working with some primary documents, and challenging students to write creatively. Quite a powerful lesson, overall, and students are unlikely to forget the content.
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September 26th, 2007 walkere
I went to a High Schools That Work network meeting yesterday. It was fairly interesting - three schools shared strategies that they have been using to improve their schools of the past few years.
One of the topics covered was how to improve enrollment in AP courses. The Assistant Superintendent for Mount Olive school district gave a presentation on their new system. Rather than make strict standards for admitting students into honors and AP courses, students can simply request to be in them.
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Posted in Education, Ramblings | 1 Comment »
September 24th, 2007 walkere
This is a trick I learned in my college education courses. Another one of my classmates thought it would be a cool idea to fake a memo on school letterhead and use it to convince students that an unpopular policy was taking effect.
He told them that they were going to be charged 10 cents per page of copy paper… and that included any tests, quizzes, and assignments they did. The point was to get them to witness in a personal way the onerous nature of taxes in colonial times.
I took the technique a step further and realized that you can create you own newspaper articles. I often use New York Times articles in class, so if an article looks identical to a real one… the students are none the wiser. Check out this guide on Associated Content to learn how to write your own fake news article and make it look real.
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September 24th, 2007 walkere
I heard a few interesting comments from other teachers today. In all of the comments, the teachers are expressing some level of disgust and or contempt for the administration. I thought it would be interesting to write them down… perhaps I’ll have to keep a log throughout the year.
In the first instance, we had just gotten out of a faculty meeting. The meeting was in the auditorium, which is down a long hallway from the main portion of the building. As you exit the auditorium, there is a set of doors leading directly out into the parking lot. For whatever reason, these two doors were locked (with padlocks). We had to walk down a long series of halls to get back to the front door - probably 3 to 4 minutes of casual walking.
One teacher was clearly annoyed and she started complaining. She said something to the effect that the administrators did whatever they could to make our lives miserable. Then she said, “It’s bad enough we have to be here every day!”
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September 23rd, 2007 walkere
In New Jersey and across the country, politics are roiling over public employee pensions. I just got into the profession, and sometimes I wonder if there will still be an effective pension program in place when I retire in thirty plus years. This is also a reason that I may leave the classroom after a few years, pursue a PhD in education, and stake a place in educational research and teacher education.
With that in mind, it’s time to start thinking about alternative forms of retirement savings. Many school districts offer 403b plans for their employees. Chances are, these are just a waste of your money unless the school actually offers matching contributions.
Check out this overview of different types of investment plans that I wrote on Helium.com. I’ve spent a good amount of time researching the various options, and you should start reading up too. We need to start planning now for the likely possibility that our safety net won’t be intact when it comes time to retire.
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September 23rd, 2007 walkere
My school has implemented a whole school reform model, as per the state’s requirements for Abbott schools. Part of this model is that the school is broken down into small learning communities.
As it is implemented in our school, students are divided into clusters of approximately 100 students. These students share the same Social Studies, Language Arts and Literacy, Math, and Science teachers. These teachers also have a common planning period where they meet each day to perform various duties.
The argument going on in the school now is… should teachers be compensated for this?
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September 22nd, 2007 walkere
Money is generally a problem with education. There’s never enough of it, and there are always too many things that need to be paid for.
So what priorities should we set?
I wrote an article at Helium, arguing that getting basic supplies is more important than paying for teacher training. After all, what good does extensive training do if you have no paper and if you have no functioning computers?
My reasoning here is partly coloured by my experience in my own school. We have no paper freely available, and the only way to get copies is to put a request in at the office. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the copies back within 2-3 days. No chance for spontaneity there.
Computers are equally haphazard. There are no central labs, and the laptop carts contain at most sixteen laptops. Of these, several are generally missing or malfunctioning. The working ones have an old version of Internet Explorer and MS Word and nothing else. The old version of explorer can’t even display many new pages correctly (like pbwiki.com).
What’s the point of spending thousands of dollars on fancy workshops when these basic needs are going unfulfilled? What do you think our priorities should be?
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