With the Best Intensions

So as an educator there were several new things that I wanted to try out this year - a structured word study program, using Flickr to share photos with parents, completing my Certificate of Educational Technology and Information Literacy, starting a masters, and maintaining a class blog. Well I will say that I did try all of these things and some are going quite well, while others are getting the better of me. On the good side are the word study and completing my certificate (this is my last required post). On the more challenging side are Fliker, the masters, and the class blog.

I started off full speed in the fall uploading pictures to Flickr and posting weekly to the class blog. Then when the December break came around I just couldn't get myself started again. The excuses are many and I'm not going to go into all of those. Instead I'm going to decide how to make next year's class blog more manageable and sustainable for me. I will start by choosing a blog format that better fits my vision. This year there were things that I wanted to do that my blog wouldn't support and I found that quite frustrating. I am a big list and schedule person so next year I will have a list and schedule to make sure that all of the curriculum areas get equal coverage on the class blog. When I was posting this year, I tried to have a post done every Friday. I think for me a better day would be on Wednesday because by Friday afternoon I'm pretty much done. Ultimately I would like to be able to post events quickly and on the same day, but I'm not sure I'm quite there yet. I think it will be worth it for me to invest in my own Flickr account next year. Just so that it is easier to manipulate the organize my photos.

The class blog experience this year wasn't all bad though. I did manage to keep the posts all about the kids and not use them as a notice boards. Also, because I wanted the blog to be something that parents looked at with their children, I always shared posts with the class before I published them. That was also a great way to proof read the posts to make sure they were mechanically correct and said what I wanted them to say.

For next year I'm going to try to remember what I have said many times in many of my posts to this blog - less is more & keep it simple.

***I do want to say a big "THANK YOU!" to the wonderful Tech-Team that we have at ISB. Without the support and encouragement of Kim, Jeff, and Dennis I would never even have attempted to use Flickr or start a class blog. You all ROCK!!!!!***

Partners Flying Across the Curriculum Together

In an earlier post I described how my college, Susi, and I introduced a plan to help our students work more effectively in partnerships. The idea was that one is the pilot and the other is the co-pilot. The pilot is in charge of whatever the task is and the co-pilot is there to verbally help or guide. The roles are then reversed to allow each child to be a pilot and co-pilot.

The project was originally designed to help the students when working with technology tools. I have used the Pilot/Co-Pilot model in all curriculum areas with my very active, energetic kindergarten students and it works like magic. They are taking turns without conflict, they are using words to help each other instead of taking over, they are learning from each, they are doing it with little or no teacher direction, and best of all they can verbalize what they are doing to others.

Here are some examples of the model in action:

These are reading partners. The pilot's job is to choose the book and read & talk about the book with the co-pilot. The co-pilot's job is to listen, ask questions, and remind the pilot what good readers do to become better readers.

These students are writing partners working together during our How-To writing unit. In this partnership the pilot is sharing his how to book by reading the steps to the co-pilot. The co-pilot is following the oral instructions and illustrations to draw a jet.

Here, math partners a playing a game called Fill the Hexagons. The pilot rolled a die and is deciding where to place a pattern block on the playing board. The co-pilot is waiting for the pilot to finish her turn and say "You're the pilot." before he rolls the dice and takes his turn.

I highly recommend trying this Pilot/Co-Pilot model with all ages of students to help them become more effective, cooperative, and helpful partnerships no matter what the topic or medium. I think you might be pleasantly surprised. I know I was!

One Size Does Not Fit All

During the second Coetail course some of my colleges and I worked on the Acceptable Use Policy for the Elementary School at ISB. As a group we agreed that one existing document was not going to be developmentally appropriate for students aged four to eleven. So we initially we decided that there needed to be a Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 2 AUP and a Grade 3 to Grade 5 AUP. After working on it for a while we soon found that even that split wasn't enough. In the end we ended up with three separate AUP's: Pre-K to Grade 1 / Grade 2 and Grade 3 / Grade 4 and Grade 5. I think the evolution of these documents is the perfect example of "one size does not fit all".

Staying in the area of technology standards I think Kim and I have found another item where one size does not fit all. As Kim and I were going over the Observation Rubric after my lesson for Course Five: Alive in the Classroom: Applied Web 2.0 Technology for Learning we discovered that while most of the criteria on the rubric could be used to score a range of grade levels one was very difficult to score in an early childhood setting. Ironically the area was "Use of Technology".
Here are the levels and descriptors for the Use of Technology standard:

Substitution: Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional improvement.
Augmentation: Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, with functional improvement.
Modification: Technology use allows for significant redesign of learning experiences.
Redefinition: Technology use allows for the creation of new learning experiences, made possible by current technology (previously not possible)

My lesson allowed the students to meet the objective of applying turn-taking strategies on a computer while working in a partnership to provide fairness and sharing of tasks. For the lesson I used the Pilot/Co-Pilot Project that Susi and I submitted for our course 4 project. Pairs of students worked together on one computer to complete patten block puzzles. The students were able to not only demonstrate this but many were able to verbalize how they were sharing and why it was important when learning. But it didn't score well on the Use of Technology Standard. It was a challenge for Kim and I to come up with ideas of how to move into the modification or redefinition descriptors for Use of Technology while keeping the tasks child-centered, developmentally appropriate, and manageable for the teacher. Any ideas would be welcome.

So maybe this part of the rubric needs to be looked at and redesigned to better "fit" young learners and those who work with them.

LESS IS MORE

I have just completed my fifth move in Thailand since arriving here less than four years ago. You would think that after that many moves I would have already weeded out and gotten rid of the things that I don't really need. But my pack-rat tendencies have kept me from doing that. So ove the past week I have opened, unpacked, given away, thrown away, and tried to organize the contents of countless boxes. As I was doing this I had an "ah-ha" moment: I am not only a pack-rat of "stuff" at home, I am a total pack-rat of "stuff" on my computer. Deleting a document for me is like donating that shirt that I know I'm going to wear again someday - even though I haven't worn it in years and it is older than my teenage children! I did a couple of quick searches on my school laptop and discovered that I have over 1,000 .doc files, almost 2,000 pdf files, and over 400 Notebook files. To many people, those numbers may not seem like a lot but, what the numbers mean to me is that I now know why I am often pushed to my frustration level when trying to find documents on my computer. I then began to go through files on my computer using the "cover flow" view on my Mac (which I absolutely love) and discovered that many of the documents are completely useless for the students I teach and the methods I use. So now my next big project will be to purge my computer files so that I only have what I really and truly need - and get them organized so that I can find them when I do need them. I'm hoping that if I have less stuff to go through on the computer I will have more time to do something more productive than swear at my computer!

Photo Attributions: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ottawastorage/4226385486/sizes/o/