Kids are Funny

I came to an interesting realization this week. Kids will do anything and learn anything if they think it's a game or a chance to color! I work my ela classroom in rotations. Students are in groups of five. After the initial one or two days of whole class instruction, I have them rotate through "centers". I am lucky that I have five computers in my classroom, so one center is computer time with compass learning where the instruction is tailored to their needs according to their map scores. I have to say that this program does seem to work. Student reading improvement has been noticed. They love, love, love this program. I have another center where they are responding to literature through reader's theater or script writing of their own to retell whatever story or read aloud I have presented that week. They love acting out the stories. This week I tried having them change the viewpoint in the book Rainbow Fish. The theme of sharing or giving away your stuff to make friends drew a negative response, but students had difficulty expressing another viewpoint. Still, they tried and that's what counts. We'll be trying that again. I also have a reading rotation for self-selected reading. They respond on a reading log, and once a week I have all students share something about what they are reading. The last rotation is the one that astounds me. I just started incorporating it this week. I have manipulatives that require students to take a group of sentences and put them in sequence so that they create a paragraph. All of the paragraphs are nonfiction. For example, one is about the first womon doctor. Another about a famous tight rope walker etc. The students love doing this activity and ask when it will be their turn to play this "game." it is amazing how well they are learning to find main idea sentences and appropriate closing sentences in order to help them put the other events in sequence. After the first couple of tries with my guidance they are off and running by themselves. These manipulative also come with answer keys that I let them check for themselves. They are learning so much and don't even know it!

Technology the kids know

Well, this week I worked on my eclassroom at school and posted a few forum questions so that I could evaluate a starting point to provide authentic opportunities for my students to write and publish using technology. I was deeply impressed by the student work sited in Bringing the Outside In by Sara Kajder. I was also a bit intimidated by her awesome classroom practices and her ability to get assignments completed in two weeks. WHAT!!!???

I did encounter a few problems. Some students had somehow been dropped from my class, while others kept trying to input the wrong password and locked themselves out of the system. It took our school web manager a few hours to figure this all out, so I will be spending some time this weekend reactivating students into my classroom. You to Lori Gorman!! You are awesome.

Here are the questions and results from students who were able to participate. 90% of the students have access to the internet at home. I was surprised at this because of the poverty level at our school. One question I asked was what technology would you use to help you create a story. I found that most students didn't quite understand the question but how the answered made me realize that at least they understood my lessons on plagiarism. The most common answer - I would use the internet to gather information and ideas but I won't copy!

The other question I asked was where do you spend the most time when you are on the internet? Most common answer - facebook and myspace.

Many of the students mentioned a program called SCRATCH which Lori Gorman had shown them. This is a downloadable program that allows students to create comic strip characers and text. Of course, the district filter will not allow access to this program, so I'll have to write a proposal to ask that it be unrestricted should we decide this would be a good entry point for publishing student writing.

I'm still thinking......

Do You Feel Old?

I remember a time, not so long ago, when I felt like a technology wiz. I was up on all the l astest software (word, excel, powerpoint)! and email... boy!I could whip them out, and even add attachments and scans! That was five minutes ago, or so it seems. And now look, I'm a dinosaur and need to have my 14 year old son or my 12 year old students roll their eyes when I ask them how to do something. I wonder if I did that five minutes ago. Oh shoot. I just blinked and now there's one more thing out there I don't know how to do! Mercy me. How's everyone else feeling out there in bloggerville?

Today is the first day of class for "Writing in the Digital Classroom." I wanted to share a couple of sites I explored today. One of the sites is http://wallwisher/. This is a place you can create a "wall." People can visit your wall and create "sticky notes" comments. I have already created a wall. If you would like to visit and comment the address is http://wallwisher/wall/cuffee. It looks fun and simple. The other site I explored that looks like kids would truly enjoy using is toondo.com. After filling out a free registration, the toonmaker feature allows the user to create their own comic strip! Great book report idea!