David Sebek's Blog, page 5

A Great Lesson for Back to School

Is it really time to be thinking about going back to school already?  Have you really stopped thinking about school?  Chances are if you are reading this post then you are a lot like me and your class is always on your mind.  In this case, it would the class that is yet to come that you are thinking about.

School will be back in session before you know it and anxious students will be walking into your room with packaged paper, unsharpened pencils and clog free glue bottles.  I am a sixth grade teacher so my future students are anxious about starting in a new school, seeing new people, adjusting to seven teachers instead of two, learning a locker combination, making it to each class on time and, of course, who they will sit next to during lunch.

The purpose of this lesson is to utilize technology to show our future students that we are approachable, and, in the case of transitioning to middle school, that we understand their plight. There is a lot of talk about flipping the classroom.  Whether you are proponent or a naysayer of the idea, one thing cannot be argued, current technology tools make it easy for us to allow students access to classroom information at home.

The Lesson

First, find some photos of yourself.  I don't know where you keep your old photos, luckily I found mine in my closet.  Lucky may not be the right word as I remember the semi-depressing feeling last summer when I realized that it had been 30 years since I was a sixth grade student in middle school.

You want to show students that you understand what it was like to be a student and share some of your interests, to find common ground before they ever walked into your room.

The best place to start is by finding some photos of yourself around the same age as your current students.  I quickly scanned in these two photos and put them in a power point slide.

Next what are some of your interests or passions that you think would be appropriate to share with your students.  My rule of thumb here is that if you hesitate and wonder if it is appropriate to share then it probably isn't.

What books do you like to read, movies you like to watch, games you like to play, and the hobbies you enjoy?  All of these will serve as ways to make you a more three dimensional person in your students eyes and to give them the idea, at least in my case, that there is life after middle school.

Technology Layer

After you find the images and create the slides its time to take the project one step further.

If you have used a video editing program before (MovieMaker, iMovie, WeVideo) then you could plug your pictures into the editing timeline and record your voice.

I chose to use a screen recording program so that I did not have to worry about timing my slides to my narration.  Screencast-O-Matic is perfect for a quick project like this.  Pull up your PowerPoint, adjust the area you want to record and press record.  It was that easy, the program recorded my voice and the images on my screen.

When the recording is done you may save it to a personal YouTube channel, save it to the Screencast-O-Matic servers or download your new video onto your computer.  The easiest option, if you do not have a YouTube channel, is to save the video to the Screencast-O-Matic servers because you can then send a URL address to your students and they can watch the video at home.

If you do not have the ability to e-mail your students before the school year starts then you can handout the URL address on the first day of school and they can watch your video for "homework."

Here is the copy of the video that I made last year:


You can make this project as simple or as detailed as you want to.  Here is a link to a very quick and easy version of this project that can be accomplished with tape, paper, a word processing program and some photos:   The Perfect First Lesson For Back To School

That's all there is to it, hopefully you and your students will find some common ground to start the year on and maybe, just maybe, share a laugh or two at the same time.  If you want some more ideas on how to start your first day of school check out this post I wrote last year.

Publishing Digitally: Sharing With Audiences Who Care

In a couple of weeks my sixth graders will begin their own Writer's Journey as they construct an original story using The Hero's Journey as a template for their writing.  
[image error] http://www.prosperityequation.com/ima... we embark on that journey, I wanted the students to take some time to look at their writer's voice and how their unique voice came into being.  The initial idea for this study came from the book Parallel Curriculum Units for Language Arts, Grades 6-12.

I introduced the idea of writer's voice with a discussion of identity.  We started our investigation of voice with the following question:What is the relationship between identity and voice?From that discussion we looked at how a writer's identity influences their voice.  Before we looked at the literature, I pre-assessed my students with the following questions:•What are the parts of your identity that are constructed?•What are the parts of your identity that are innate?•Give an example of how your identity might change with a change in contexts.
There was a lot of confusion in the beginning about what is innate and constructed about our identities.  To help them understand the difference between innate and constructed we redefined the idea as "What is the difference between inheriting something and constructing something?"
Their understanding of innate and constructed identities became much deeper and interesting as students thought about their lives and the parts of their identity they inherited from their families (genetics and status) and the unique experiences that built their identities over time (broken arms, trips, competitions, pets).  Some of my classes even began to discuss their religious upbringing with some believing that religion is innate and others saying that it is constructed.  
With an understanding of innate and constructed identities, we started analyzing literature, beginning with a beautiful poem by George Ella Lyon titled "Where I'm From" As we read the poem we talked the parts of Lyon's life that were constructed and the parts that were innate. 
I then asked students to identify the part's of their lives that were constructed and the parts that were innate.  They listed 25 - 30 events or parts of their lives that were either constructed or innate.  I shared a few of my own stories about my identity to help get the ball rolling and to help the students feel more comfortable sharing personal memories and experiences.
Then the classes evaluated their lists, selecting the 10 -12 moments, events or things they felt had the biggest impact on their identity.  From there, we used Lyon's poem as a template to share that unique identity and voice.  Students did not have to use Lyon's poem as a template and could explore their own poetic structure.  But for many it was a nice scaffold to help them organize their thinking.
I knew from the beginning that the students needed to be able to share their poems beyond stapled copies to the wall.  The power of these poems lies in the connection family members can make to these children's lives.  How wonderful would it be to hear your child share their work?  How often does a grandmother or uncle or parent get to hear a child reading their work?  Especially an original work in which the student explores their identity and the most important moments that have constructed who they are.
I created a class account on audioboo.fm Audoboo is a free app that can be downloaded on most digital devices but also has an online recording feature.  This worked for my classroom because some of my students have their own devices that they can use to record but many students needed to use school provided technology. Audioboo allowed everyone to record their poems regardless of device.
After the poems were recorded, I was able to paste the embed code from their recording into my class web page built using Weebly 
After the poems were posted I sent out a group e-mail to my parents and received nothing but positive feedback about the poems and the recordings.  Here is a link to the page where the poems were posted:
http://www.mrsebek.com/where-im-from-poems.html
I hope you are able to have your students record and share some of their own writing this year.  Audioboo was an easy and quick way to extend my students writing to real audiences who cared about their work.



 

Tone and Mood in Literature - Moving Beyond Paragraphs

I slammed my hand down on the desk.

"What are you doing?" I bellowed.
Frozen, terrified students stared at me, looked at their classmates and back to me.  Shock swallowed their breath and turned every fiber of attention to me, the psychotic teacher, standing in the middle of the room.
I stood up, waited another moment and then asked, "How did my tone affect your mood?"
A collective sigh lifted the tension, numerous hands went to chests and a few "Oh my Gods" slipped into the growing murmur of relief.
That's how we started talking about the concept of tone and mood.  The key idea being that an author's tone can affect your mood.  Often times students confuse the two ideas because they are so closely related so I wanted a concrete, shared experience that we could all refer to if there was any confusion between tone and mood.
That was about two weeks ago.  The students still talk about my tone that day.  They laugh about it now, though I still notice a hint of nervousness in their chuckles.
Students in sixth grade have to analyze pieces of literature for the tone the author used in a particular piece of writing.  It is a skill that is often tested on our state assessment, as I am sure it is in other states.  Also, in seventh grade, students have to be able to create well written responses to prompts using text evidence to support their viewpoint.
This has been a difficult concept for me to teach in the past.  This year I mashed together a continuum of lessons that builds towards those ideas.  So far I am very happy with the results.  Of course it all started with a very concrete understanding.
Analysis of Art - Transmediation
To help children develop their creativity I look for ways to blend my content with other disciplines. With the internet it has become easy to share the art work of great artists with my students. Which makes it much easier to begin the process of transmediation, the process of recreating meaning of a text from one medium to another. In these lessons students will recreate meaning from a painting by observing, interpreting and creating their own art interpretations that display the tone of a written piece of text.

As with any new process, we have to scaffold the learning. My goal is not so much to teach them how to analyze for tone (important ELA skills) but to develop the universal process of observe, interpret and create. There are many beautiful pictures that lead wonderful discussion like these ones from Winslow Homer painted in the late 1890's.
After the Hurricane, Winslow Homer, 1899
A great way to get started is with this lesson idea from byrdseed.com which introduces the students to the ideas of finding implicit and explicit details in art. 
[image error] Portrait of Dr. Gachet, Vincent Van Gogh, 1890
Students observe the portrait and interpret how Dr. Gachet is feeling.  His feeling, or the tone of the piece, is an implicit detail, the evidence to support that thinking are the explicit details.  The students often say that Dr. Gachet is sad.  The tone of the portrait is sadness.  That is an implicit detail, the students have inferred or interpreted that he is feeling sad based on their observations.  Then the students have to find the explicit evidence to prove that he is sad:  his frown, the dark colors, the hand on his face, his droopy eyes.
When students are finished they can begin to compose or create a short paragraph to describe the tone of the painting.  The implicit detail is the topic sentence.  The explicit details are the supporting sentences.  Very structured, well-thought out and meets the goals of our state learning objectives.  But with my students I wanted to continue to go deeper with the idea and to also show them that a well written paragraph is not always the end all be all of our class.

Analysis of Tones in Videogames
Motivating students often comes form tying into their interests.  Looking at outstanding art has its place, students need to be exposed to the work of the master artists.  But looking at still pictures can only hold their attention for so long.  (I wrote about keeping students attention in this blog post last year) So the next level of tone analysis tapped into their love of videogames, it could also include movie trailers as well.
The lesson comes from edutopia.com and requires students to watch video game trailers and analyze the tone of the trailer.






Using what the students learned from analyzing art, they watch the videos two or three times, use their tone word list to identify a suitable tone (implicit detail) and then find three explicit details from the video to support their thinking.
The Limbo preview leaves much more of an impact on them than Little Big Planet 2.  Some students will begin to put their hands over their ears when the musical dissonance increases towards the middle of the clip. Ori and the Blind Forest can be broken into segments, allowing students to analyze how the tone of a piece of text can change as the story progresses.
There is a high level of engagement when students are watching these previews and it is easy for them to remember their writing lessons from Dr. Gachet:  implicit is the topic sentence and explicit is the supporting sentences.
Analysis of Tone in Literature
The next piece was to take the concepts of tone and analyze written work; at least that is what the state wants us to do.  
Until now the students had been practicing in their notebooks with me walking around, spot checking their work.  I wanted a  quick way to gather data on their writing without taking home 140 sheets of paper. 
Thank you Google Forms.  I created a form and embedded it on my class website.  The form begins with a quick review of the concept of tone.  Then students read a short paragraph and write a well-formatted paragraph explaining their perspective on the tone of the paragraph.
When the students submit their form I get a spreadsheet that looks like this:

Now I can quickly assess how my students are doing with the concepts of tone and explicit and implicit details.
But like I said earlier, I do not want well structured paragraph writing to be the highest pinnacle of academic achievement in my room.  So enter one last piece to the puzzle:  humumet.  A concept I discovered while reading a post from a classroom blog that is no longer online.
Students skim The Conch Bearer for passages that display obvious tones. Students identify the tone (implicit detail), and then identify words (explicit details) on the page that could be used to create the tone. They circle these words and then use art to edit out all the other words on the page with a picture that matches the new tone and/or narrative. Their work as an artist is to create an atmosphere in images that matches the words on the page; thesis statement as picture.
Below are examples of some of the work done in my class. I think you should be able to infer the tone based on their art and the words they chose.











My students still need more practice with writing well structured paragraphs based on analysis of an author's tone.  But I can honestly say that my students this year have a much better grasp of the difference between tone and mood and how explicit details work to explain implicit details. 
It all ties back to transmediation the process of observing, interpreting and creating.

Teaching Design Thinking: Week One is in the Books

Tina Seeling writes in her new book inGenius that we keep telling our students that they can always invent their future but we ignore the fact that the heart of invention is creativity.  We do not teach creativity in schools.  We are selling our students an empty promise.

This year I have the unique challenge and thrill of teaching seventh and eighth grade students about creativity and problem solving.  For almost a decade I have been coaching students for creative problem solving competitions for Destination Imagination and Future Problem Solving.  However this is the first time I have had to design a class around those principles.

Thankfully creative people are so open to sharing.  I am borrowing heavily from the Stanford d.school K-12 site and from numerous e-mails to the Texas A&M University Institute for Applied Creativity.

My challenge this week was to embed two fundamental tenets of the class:  the opportunity for innovation is everywhere and to be a great problem solver you have to look at the challenge from different perspectives.

To begin our discussion on perspectives I used the Marshmallow Challenge.  I have used this challenge in class for a couple of years for a break away from the routine of school.  This year I used it to give the class a shared experience on the importance of perspective in problem solving.



I had eight groups of children attempt the challenge on Thursday, only three groups had a standing structure at the end of the eighteen minute time limit.  The lesson:  You forgot about the marshmallow.



The key to solving the challenge is to start with the marshmallow and build the structure from there.  The marshmallow is a metaphor for the people we are solving problems for - we can never forget to take their perspective into account when designing solutions to their problems.

We did the exact same challenge on Friday and seven of the eight groups had standing structures with the tallest being 24.5 inches.  They started with the marshmallow and worked their way down.



For homework this week the class had to post their reflections on the first week of class.  Here are their thoughts on the impact of the marshmallow challenge:

I learned that when solving problems, you should always be thinking about the person you're solving them for. 
Alice

In this past week I have learned to work better with others and--in the case of the marshmallow challenge--"always put the customer on top" (haha).
Ross

I learned that you should always be open minded and make several prototypes before the ta-da moment.
Tomas

Also I learned that everything we build has a marshmallow, all designs and innovations should cater to the customer, and that design plans should include several prototypes.
Saarang

We learned that good design has to go through many prototypes before reaching the final product, and that throughout the designing process the customer must always be kept in mind.
Michael

As the year goes on we will keep building on these concepts:  the world is ripe for innovation, fail fast and fail often and most importantly never forget the marshmallow.

Tech Integration - An Easy First Step

This a great post by Bill Ferriter a sixth grade ELA teacher from North Carolina. He posts a sentiment I have long agreed with:  technology has promised to fix education for 25 years and it has yet to do so. The only thing that will is great teaching.

What kids want is to be social, to share and to work together - is that really any surprise?  That is how we are hard wired to survive, that's how humanity evolved, in tribes - live together or die alone.

So the biggest tech improvement I think any teacher can make this year is the most basic:  move the desks. Allow conversation, allow collaboration. Then once you get to know the students, add in the technology that would best fit their needs; not the other way around.

My principal shared our state testing results earlier this week.  If my districts annual state test scores showed anything it's what we already know:  the kids are dying alone. Moving the desks together and allowing conversation isn't going to lower our scores.

When I am evaluated this school year on tech integration in my classroom I hope my evaluator takes into account that I integrate technology everyday. I leverage the power of sharing and communicating; our species greatest innovation.