TBTE 412 Summer 2007: Record of Activities
Navigation short-cut: Session jump by
number
1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8 - 9 - 10 - 11 - 12 -
During class
- Opening survey
- Introductions
- Going over syllabus...relevant links are
- Framing for the course
- Know
thy..
- disciplines
- curriculum: We'll get started with a curriculum scavenger hunt
- context. Consider, for example, assessment
- voici the testing schedule in Pennsylvania for 2006-07 (most recent available)
- voici
the PSSA results for 2005-04 (most
recent available)
- disciplines
- (T(P(CK)))
- Lassie, get help!
- In
addition to NCSS and PCSS, there's also Tapped
In
- There are also a million resources for
teachers on the web. A good place to start is Kathy Schrock's site
- In
addition to NCSS and PCSS, there's also Tapped
In
- Know
thy..
- Demo: Weaving the Globe
- What content / skills can this activity be used to address?
- How might this activity be adapted to address
- learners with special needs
- older students / younger students
- other content / skills
- If you want my Google Earth file to play
with, it's here
- (open)
Session 2 info is available in a
powerpoint posted
to the course Blackboard site (bb.lehigh.edu; linked under "Course
Docs," I believe) and is also available here.
During class
- Check back
- content journaling?
- Great sources of material include
- Library of Congress' American Memory collection. Plus cruise around loc.gov some more--lots of great stuff everywhere. For example, Documenting the South archive at UNC-Chapel Hill. Check out their World War I propaganda posters: great, strong visuals that students can grasp and deconstruct.
- Audio and transcripts of US presidents at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at UVA. (There's an AWESOME clip of Johnson ordering pants...VERY not safe for polite company)
- More presidential things from the Presidential Timeline site from UT-Austin
- Flickr.com/creativecommons,
especially for current/global issues. Note that some school districts
block Flickr URLs, tho....
- Wikipedia is actually not a bad place to start--lots of media there. But if that feels too shameful, try...
- The teacher side of PrimaryAccess has a browse-able database of images tagged in by teachers--just hit the "Find Images" tab. This collection includes material from all of the above, plus more. Like wikipedia, it's user-generated, so you will have to fact-check.
- (feel
free to append your own suggestions to this list!)
- Pico-quiz on Ch. 1 & 2
- If anyone cares, a graphic of the responses on question #2 is here
- Speaking of quizzes...
- Curriculum presentations:
- First we begin with a very superficial, just-in-time learning intro to SmartBoards
- Presentations -- final versions will be uploaded to Blackboard
- From curriculum to lesson
- Human memory & chunking -- a fun article to check out is "The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information" (at http://www.musanim.com/miller1956/)
- Chunk your way to a curriculum map
- ...and again to a unit plan
- Sample A (by a 2nd grade teacher, addresses communities)
- Sample B (by a teacher-ed student, addresses life on farms)
- ...and again to a lesson plan
- Handy tool for all of
this: the concept of Backwards Design (materials stashed in Lehigh's Blackboard site)
- How to get ghost acreage out of your instructional time: integrate!
- We'll model this using cherished childhood texts; one of mine is this; another of mine is that.
- What do these texts lend themselves to?
- Google Earth?
- Locating images to represent people/places. Hmmmm....we've played that game already
- Locating latitude and longitude?
- ...how about Flickr.com?
- Flickr.com/creativecommons
- Flickr.com/maps
- And now let's share yours!
Picking
up from what was left un-addressed yesterday:- Revisit on the standards graphic. I broke it out into four steps
- Content areas + PA standards
- ...now add some standards from other associations -- I think these add clarity; note that Parker will do some of this work for you.
- ...now bring in METHODS. This is what Parker is doing in Ch. 3-5 and elsewhere.
- Integration strategies using children's literature
- Power & appeal of reading
- Appeal of being read to
- Connecting to social studies? Might be tricky...
- Lesson planning
- Review of the concept: from standards to curriculum map to unit plan to lesson plan
- Backwards design--see docs in Blackboard.
- Lesson plan assignment
- Due dates?
- Specifications
- One plan, be sure that this lesson incorporates students' hands-on use of technology
- Then re-work the same plan to incorporate little or no tech
- Resource list assignment
- Due dates
- Specifications
- Handy tool to use: del.icio.us -- for example, see my del.icio.us account.
- And
onto something new: poster exercise drawn from this
book
- Old business
- Content journals, first submit: I'll collect it if it's on paper; if it's electronic, please post it in Blackboard in the class forum
- And now for a pico-quiz...
- Overview of the new business
- Class sessions this week, next week, week after: let's see the calendar and then the course map.
- New business #1: getting started on first step of midterm
- New business #2: getting started on digital video and your assignment (making an instructional digital video)
- Midterm
- ISTE's NETs*T
- Matrix
- ...of methods and technologies
- ... ... of content and methods, plugging in technologies
- Example of matrix
- Assignment
- Style = informal but professional
- Be descriptive and thorough
- Ballpark of length = 2 pp. per integration scenario. So: three scenarios = 6 pp. total. But again, this is a ballpark estimate. You might feel the need to exceed it, and that's fine. If you're significantly under it, that's probably not fine -- you're probably not being descriptive enough...
- Grading will be according to this rubric
- Digital video
- Getting your feet wet: We'll do an activity stolen from a former colleague; it's called five-picture_charades
- Your pictures will be uploaded to either here, here, or here so we can see them.
- And then we'll make a movie with them!
- The value of teacher-created digital video?
- Let's watch this video
- ... and then let's watch this video.
- .... Which do you prefer? Why?
- The value of student-created digital video?
- Let's watch this video
- ... and let's watch this video.
- .... Which do you prefer? Why?
- Creating an instructional digital video
- Content area = anything in social studies
- Model = something for classroom use, either
- a TEACHER-CREATED video, intended to craft a powerful piece of media to be used with your students
- a STUDENT-CREATED video, assigned by you in a learning-by-doing strategy. If you're choosing this option, you're creating a "demo" video, to show the students what they need to do.
- Technical requirements
- Use any movie-making tool you like (iMovie, Movie Maker, PrimaryAccess, JumpCut, etc.)
- When using desktop editors (i.e., Movie Maker, iMovie): be sure to turn in the VIDEO file and not the PROJECT file
- Minimum length = 1 minute. Maximum length = up to you, but really--shorter is better.
- Copyright
- Please stay on the right side of the law by using some combination of
- self-created images or music
- archival images or music
- For an example of copyright-cleared music, see the "Historical Music" page at the Digital History site at the University of Houston
- More music can be found at the Internet Archive audio page
- Archival images abound. Keep in mind, though, that not everything displayed at, say, the Library of Congress is the PROPERTY of the LOC, and may not be reproducible. But for an example of a cleaned and cleared archive, see the Virginia Center for Digital History--they have lots of projects with images, such as the Race and Place image database about life in Charlottesville during the Jim Crow era.
- copyright-accessible images or music
- Creativecommons.org has all sorts of media
- flickr.com/creativecommons is a great source of copyright-accessible images. See, for example, one of the larger pools of world history photos or historical photographs
- Regardless of the legal status, be considerate by citing your sources for images / audio / other media
- Due dates / process
- Thursday, 19 July = rough cut (storyboard or image stream or script or a full version, albeit in its rough form)
- Tuesday, 24 July = check-in on progress, answering technical questions, etc.
- Thursday, 26 July = POST your final cut to Blackboard discussion thread
- Tuesday, 31 July = grade + feedback returned to you
- Time permitting: more playing with flickr
- An example of a personal site
- An example of a set of photos
- An example of a group
- An example of a pool
- An example of a map
- ...And pulling flickr photos into PrimaryAccess -- log in and try tomhammond/lehigh
- Old business
- Quizzes coming back, and a brief comment/discussion on globes, maps
- Which is further north, Boston or Venice?
- Which US state is the furthest west?
- ...and by the way, there's lots of awesome resources / activity suggestions in the textbook, and Ch. 5 was particularly chock full of them--for example, see pp. 176-177, p. 160. We just aren't getting into all of them due to time constraints.
- Content journals
- First entry coming back
- Entries 2-4
- due when?
- expectations?
- And a peek over the horizon: Yes, the midterm and the digital video and the lesson plan are big assignments, but that's the crest of the mountain--everything else is downhill sledding...
- Building on the big projects (midterm, digital video, and lesson plan) will draw us into a discussion of assessment
- A wee ppt to base our discussion
- A handout capturing some of my ideas
- An activity sheet to guide your digital video feedback process
- And just for funsies, we have
- ratemyprofessors.com, and
- hammond.feedback ( at ) gmail -- pwd is "feedback"
- Digital video
- Reporting back on assessment activity
- Technical / conceptual Q & A
- Using Blackboard discussion as a resource
- Midterm
- Pair-and-share on x-axis
- Reporting back on pair-and-share
- Staying in your pair, compose a y-axis
- Reporting back on y-axis
- Looking at next week
- Tuesday
- Thursday
- Time permitting: silent timeline activity
No class--I'm at a conference. However, please
- Produce and email me the first square of your midterm
- In the Blackboard discussion forum, share your lesson plan drafts with one another and comment on them
- Work on your digital video assignment. I recommend that you try producing a video file, no matter how rough, and posting it to Blackboard as well
No class--I'm flying back from the conference. However, please
- Complete your pair-and-share of lesson plans
- Finish your midterm (due Tuesday)--you should have received feedback on your first square from me
- Finish off your digital video (due Tuesday)
- Today's business is citizenship, but first we have some loose ends to follow
- Geography:
- Something from p. 172 of the textbook, thought we might try it out. Doesn't quite work (need better equipment!), but you'll get the idea. What concept(s) can this teach? In what ways canthis activity be extended?
- Clarification: Geography = ?? (I've mentioned many concepts but only truly modeled one--and that's what has stuck. So: Poor job of modeling, but I think we have a teachable moment here.)
- Digital video
- Digital video for instruction
- Teacher-created, student-viewed (learning by watching?)
- Student-created (learning by doing), student-critiqued (learning by evaluating), student-viewed (learning by watching...perhaps)
- ...and now for something completely different
- Lessons learned about technology
- First we turn to Walter Mossberg: “Personal computers are just too hard to use, and it’s not your fault.” For more, and to see my source, here's The New Yorker's Ken Auletta column about Mossberg.
- Stop and contemplate the evolution of portable data
- And then reflect upon your own experiences as a movie-maker
- Pausing to appreciate Bandura's work on self-efficacy
- Hopefully you went from 0 to 1 ... someday you might be at 2...and I invite you to take 3 as a model.
- And the same goes for lesson-planning
- ...but you may never get to 2 with tech integration! Or at least, without the attitude displayed in 3....
- So what did you learn?
- About the technicals?
- The teaching?
- Teaching about tech
- Teaching about content with tech
- ...and we have some looking ahead to do
- Welcome to the downhill slope: You've turned in the biggest assignments, and what's left is peanuts
- Resource list
- Elementary social studies manifesto
- Final portfolio
- Here's a handy template for you to use if you wish (.ppt).
- Note that the format doesn't matter--do it on paper, in a ppt, as a website. Just to demonstrate the plasticity, here's that same template as a single-page webfile (.mht; Internet Explorer only, sadly enough...).
- Citizenship education
- A little learning-by-doing
- Let's start with a snack
- While you're snacking, here's a little quiz (not graded!)
- Contemplating the sweep of views of citizenship
- Opinions
- Essentiality
- From the NCSS standards (1994): "Social studies is the integrated study of the social sciences and humanities to promote civic competence. The primary purpose of social studies to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world" (p. 3)
- "Democracy is not a perpetual motion machine that runs on its own. It is a human invention that must continually be reinvented. People become democratic citizens when they engage in this ongoing invention of democracy. Without democratic citizens, there can be no democracy" (Parker, 2005, p. 68)
- "The 9/11 attacks reminded everyone of how basic social studies education is. We ignore it at our peril" (Thornton, 2004, p. 217)
- "The boys and girls of the Third Reich, when educated to the purposes of the Third Reich, became barbarians." (Baldwin, 1988)
- "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we thik them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them but to inform their discretion." (Thomas Jefferson, 1787)
- Frameworks
- values-knowledge-skills (mainstream civics)
- A variant (?) is character education -- for a shorthand on Character Counts!, see the "Six Pillars of Character"; but this begs a question...perhaps test out these values against MLK (specifically, "Letter from a Birmingham Jail") and see if they all square with his point.
- participation -- see also their awesome ppt introducing the concept and process. SAVOR the transitions....
- A variant off of this is service-learning
- social justice
- ...and is the appropriate frame of reference national or global, anyway?
- A little more learning-by-doing
- How does a bill become a law? (or not)
- Text (warning: 96-page pdf!)
- Graphics
- Enactive
- Or contrast with the real deal: thomas.loc.gov
- From information / attitudes to VALUES: A return to the concept of sharing (or not)
- Methods talk
- From the textbook
- From your midterms / lesson plans
- ...and a little blue-sky thinking
- and a warning: Consider this article (NYT 31 July 2007)
- complexity of information, issues
- ability to misinterpret / misattribute
- dangers of
- civics-on-the-fly
- egocentric fallacy of teaching
- Between now and Thursday
- Assignments due Thursday
- Lesson plan (two versions)
- Read Parker, Ch. 6
- Work on assignments due next week
- Content journal
- Resource list
- Elementary social studies manifesto
- Final portfolio
Session 10 - Thursday, 2 Augustus
- First, an amuse-bouche: A pico-quiz on Parker, Ch. 6, bien sur
- Thinking about things to do?
- Due today: Lesson plans
- Expand-a-comment: Resources for lesson planning
- What-you-find-through-Google
- .edu, .org, .k12, .com
- reviewed or un-reviewed?
- grounded in content area and/or research on teaching and learning, or just cool stuff to do?
- that being said...
- Kathy Schrock is generally good, has a critical eye
- Not as a resource, but as a concept, check out TeachersTeachingTeachers. (If you're into ed tech, tho, do check them out.)
- More of the same: curriki.org. I've been skeptical of them, but it's evolving...stay tuned.
- Join Tapped In and get directly plugged into a large teacher community--talk to them and you'll be able to find a community that fulfills your needs.
- NCSS standards book -- nice vignettes
- NCSS periodicals
- Theory and Research in Social Education (research 'n' such; for the hard-core or for academics)
- Social Education (practitioners; great tech issue every April)
- Middle Level Learning (middle school practitioners)
- Social Studies and the Young Learner (elementary practitioners)
- Due next Tues: Resource list
- Ques/comment?
- Due next Thurs: Final portfolio and everything that goes with it (e.g., elem ss manifesto, plus versions of all previous assignments
- Has anyone started working on this?
- And now for some ECONOMICS
- Engaging your previous learning!
- What do you know about it?
- When/where/how did you learn it?
- What's your impression of economics?
- What is it good for, anyway?
- Down to business: Many, many resources exist. To get started, let's take a look at Wise Pockets
- Go to the clubhouse, meet the friends, espec Tim
- Go to the library and check out Tim's Turn to Learn.
- ...and discuss. What did you like? Not like? What classroom activities does this lend itself to? What changes might you make?
- And now something different: Let's play "Economes." I made this up, improvising off some lesson plan ideas from others (this one, for example). Steal it and claim it as your own! We'll be using a fishbowl technique, too, so watch for that.
- Economes, take 1
- And a folllow-up discussion of economics terminology
- Economes, take 2: Let's play it again with Monopoly money...and a twist! (And note that the fishbowl gets inverted.)
- And another follow-up discussion
- So let's stop to discuss: What did you like? Not like? What follow-ups does this lend itself to? What changes might you make?
- Economics the dismal science vs. the active science: it's all a question of methods: plotting a demand graph of fish sandwiches vs. A Market in Wheat. (OK, that's not exactly true: in the long run, we're all dead; depending on your model, fiscal policy changes are an exercise in futility and may make things worse; markets are smarter than people--yeah...this gets pretty depressing after a while....)
- To feed your (economics) head with schema, paradigms, and flights of fancy (and any drug connotations are hereby vigorously denied) try the following. Not suitable for elementary students, but may help you think/plan/dream (or however Microsoft is shilling these days).
- Freakonomics book and blog. Non-traditional applications of economics, as well as some traditional ones. Nice packaging, though, of the fundamental concepts (scarcity, choice, incentives, opportunity cost), just applied to things you know, understand, and care about--as opposed to bond markets or whatever. Some controversy over the arguments, though, so lets consider...
- Freedomnomics...but really and truly you're missing out if you don't pick up on the back story between these two volumes. (And just contemplate the covers of these two works. The contrasts are delicious, pun intended.)
- The Armchair Economist (book and "Everyday Economics" column by the same author) is a little more long-lived and mainstream
- A fun book with lots of fascinating (but challenge-able, if that's a word) arguments is The Wisdom of the Crowds.
- Before exiting, be sure that you stop and consider the insidious agenda-setting of economics. It's like Adam Smith's Invisible Hand...except it's at work in the curriculum. I almost wish I had a second life to live being brought up on Mao Zedong Thought (or whatever--doesn't matter) just so I could compare the two. It's just such a different view of the universe when you're focused on the market transaction, exclusively, versus the means or production or the value addedat each step of the production process....
- And here's your dose of current events, following up from our last class: Children's Health Bill Approved by House
Session 11 - Tuesday, 7 August
Reminder: I haven't changed the assignments page, but just to be clear:
- I will drop your lowest quiz grade.
- Only TWO content journal entries required. You can turn in more than two; that will count in your favor. (But no promises being made!)
- Sharing resource lists--definitely take notes during! (Also: feel free to share with classmates by uploading to Blackboard.)
- An online community of teachers -- I've meant to bring this up about four times, always ran out of time to do it...so without further ado, let's see Tapped In: http://tappedin.org
- Log in with guest status or sign up for a free account
- Note the campus metaphor: grounds, buildings, floors, rooms
- Central building is free for anyone to use: create an office, create a group
- Note the signpost to the k-12 campus
- Search groups for a topic you're interested in (e.g., "social studies")
- Look at the calendar to see what workshops are coming up
- See the transcript archive to be able to read over past workshops. (Note that they have no search feature and lousy browsing, so to really use it, search it through Google, using "site:http://ti2data.sri.com/transcripts/" as your first search term.)
- Teachers and teacher-created websites (and blogs, wikis, etc.)
- Some schools require teachers to post sites
- Here's a public high school:
http://www.ccs.k12.va.us/schools/chs/teacher_pages.html -- check out
the social studies section, although the other content areas have some
nice examples as well. Note that
- Some teachers work inside the school webserver (URL stays within ccs.k12)
- Some teachers go outside the school webserver (URL switches to a different address)
- Some teachers supplement their main platform (website, blog, whatever) with additional tools (e.g., Moodle)
- Here's a private K-12 school: http://www.countryday.net/Directory/Default.htm -- look at the left-hand links to go to pages of lower school teachers, middle school, etc.
- And here's an entire school district that has required teachers to keep a blog: http://www.glnd.k12.va.us/podcasts/blogs.shtml -- hit "Teacher weblogs" in the right-hand navigation to get a list of all the blogs
- Note that the district is also getting into podcasting, but we'll hold off on that for today...
- An increasing number (no, I don't have any figures...) of teacher preparation programs are requiring websites from all teacher candidates. One example is at Wake Forest University: http://www.wfu.edu/~cunninac/students2k.html#2007 -- if you want to see an explanation of the assignment, see here: http://www.wfu.edu/~cunninac/technologyportfolio.htm
- And of course some teachers do this on their own because they find it adds value to their teaching: check out Dan McDowell at http://ahistoryteacher.com/
- The entire site is worth a look, but for me the must-not-miss is his use of wikis. See here: http://www.ahistoryteacher.com/apwhreview/index.php?title=Main_Page -- one wiki is a wikipedia-within-the-classroom to review for the summative exam, and the other wiki is an innovative use of the wiki platform to have students create branching narratives
- So why would a teacher want to do this?
- Personal impact
- Professional development
- Organizing info
- Showcasing work
- Classroom impact
- Organizing, providing access to info
- Differentiation among classes, students
- Showcasing student work (after addressing privacy concerns -- either place behind password or remove identifying info)
- Communicating with parents (assuming that you're being mindful of access/equity concerns)
- Eliciting student work that is
- otherwise impossible in more traditional formats
- more self-motivated than in traditional formats
- ...and how well does this line up with the concept of "powerful social studies"? Here's the document from the NCSS (jump down to p. 7); the main points are that social studies is "powerful" when the teaching and learning is
- meaningful (i.e., moving toward important
understandings and skills for democratic citizenship. Opposite:
"memorizing disconnected bits of information or practicing skills in
isolation" -p. 8)
- integrative (i.e., crosses disciplinary boundaries to bring in concepts "from the arts, sciences, and humanities, from current events, and from local examples and students' experiences." - p. 9)
- value-based (i.e., "considers the ethical dimensions of topics and addresses controversial issues" -p. 11)
- challenging (i.e., "The teacher models seriousness of purpose and a thoughtful approach to inquiry and uses instructional strategies designed to elicit and support similar qualities from students." Students are to "build a case based on relevant evidence and arguments and to avoid derisive and other inappropriate behaviors" - p. 12)
- active (i.e., teachers are actively building and
refining their professional practice; students and teachers play an
active role in the classroom during instruction. Students collaborate;
teacher scaffolds)
- How does it work
- Fundamentals of computing
- data
- applications
- operating systems
- networks
- a server = ...
- You and your webpages
- Here
- webpage editor
- webpages
- FTP client or some other mechanism
- internet access
- There
- webserver space
- Building schema requires metaphors
- writing on a whiteboard (data), whiteboard marker (application), whiteboard (operating system...note that it's not networked!)
- artwork (webpage) on the wall (webserver)
- necktie (image) on a shirt (webpage)
- ...more on metaphors = Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff & Johnson): "Metaphor ... is a fundamental mechanism of mind, one that allows us to use what we know about our physical and social experience to provide understanding of countless other subjects.
- Some tools
- for hosting
- Freebies
- Webserver space--will come with ads, some of which may be unfortunate
- Wiki spaces
- seedwiki.com -- my fave, obviously. I like the editing interface (very GUI) and the guys who run it are very nice. No ads, plus really powerful widgets
- For an example of the for-pay level, the Auburn University School of Architecture uses seedwiki to run their community site, wikifish. Be sure to grasp the zeitgeist just by hitting the "changes" link.
- pbwiki.com -- used by people I respect. The editing interface is a lot like the blogger interface, if that matters to you. Free level has ads.
- For an example of a for-pay level, see this wiki for a Canadian K-6 school, St. Francois Xavier Community School.
- wikispaces -- has ads, seems to be popular among teachers.
- An ed professor at Texas A&M I know uses one for one of her courses: http://sesp.wikispaces.com/
- Blog space
- Blogger.com is the one I'd recommend -- purchased by Google so it's stable, doesn't seem as not-safe-for-k12 as livejournal or the others. Also, if you already have a Google account (e.g., you have gmail), then you don't have to create a new account--just log in and go. HOWEVER: The "Next blog" link is danger-from-strangers. For that reason, I can't recommend blogger/blogspot as something you'd use with students, parents, or admin unless you mask the link (ex: see i5bala.blogspot.com).
- ...assuming you can get your own space (see below), I'd recommend downloading and installing WordPress (http://wordpress.org) -- you can control accounts, commenting, apppearance (e.g., ads), visibility, etc.
- Perks-for-being-affiliated
- Your Lehigh space...good for as long as you're here. For example: http://lehigh.edu/~tch207
- If you haven't already, set it up here: http://www.lehigh.edu/computing/web/start.html
- Your k12 school's server--note that you'll probably have to
work through the district's central admin for this--might be a slow
process.
- for editing
- Most powerful free tool I've found is Kompozer. Has some drawbacks, but it's good enough for me
- Proprietary tools you may have heard of
- Dreamweaver (expensive, powerful, hard to learn)
- Frontpage (MS product, so more ubiquitous but annoying)
- for transporting -- note that if you're using a web host, you probably don't have to do this. If you're working in your Lehigh space, you'll have to use it. If you're working in a k12 space, you may have to use it.
- Lehigh recommends SSH. However, you can't just download and install--you have to get it from a Lehigh CD. So maybe try OpenSSH?
- An old favorite of mine is LeechFTP
- If you can get your hands on a copy, SecureFX is the most powerful tool I've used.
- for learning
- Lehigh provides plenty of start-up info: http://www.lehigh.edu/computing/web/building.html
- If you just want to dive in and figure it out as you go, jump straight to an HTML code page.
- There are plenty of choices, but most of them are pretty business-like --- see http://www.psacake.com/web/dy.asp
- For the full fun and flavor of untutored DIY, see http://cedesign.net/help2j.htm; note also the plug-in page at http://cedesign.net/dodads.htm
- If you're reading to think design,
- a good place to start is Robin Williams' site: http://www.ratz.com/features.html
- an irresponsible, laughing-at-other-people's-shortcomings place to start is http://webpagesthatsuck.com. I once submitted a site to The Daily Sucker: http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/dailysucker/. Didn't get accepted. (If you want to see the site: http://www.cgijeddah.com/cgijed/index.htm)
- for your sanity, both in teaching and in using tech: Remember the following
- The perfect is the enemy of the good. So don't obsess about getting it perfect--just get it done
- Successive approximation is your friend. Just get it functional; you can refine it during future iterations
- Try it alone, try it with a student, THEN try it with a class
- Incremental vs. entity view of intelligence (Carol Dweck, Stanford) -- this ain't rocket science
- Closing off for today
- Quick version of the silent timeline activity -- I've been meaning to do this with history content, but we'll do it today with a making-webpages-sequence
- What, you think I'd leave you without a tech-based tool for timelining/sequencing? Hah! Check out SIMILE Timeline project from MIT. The examples page is fun.
- There's also a proprietary product called Timeliner; don't have a copy to show you.\
- Thanks to Nate Horst, I learned about the following nifty ways to do timelining in Excel (http://www.microsoft.com/Education/CreateTimeline.mspx) and Word (http://www.microsoft.com/Education/timelinesword.mspx) -- thanks!
- Final portfolio progress report?
- Elementary social studies manifesto progress report?
Before we say, "So long and thanks for all the fish," we have some housekeeping and some instructional strategies to attend to. And one last cool demo
- Cool demo: What to do with those resource lists (if you wish). Your demonstrator = Ray.
- Housekeeping
- Course evals: We have TWO, one from Lehigh, one from me
- Lehigh eval filled out on paper...I'm sure you know the drill. Fill it out and slide it into the envelope.
- My eval is accessible as a Word doc here; please
- Download it to your computer
- Fill it out To maintain anonymity, please DON'T put your name on it (even if you want to--it reduces the anonymity of everyone else. Pretend you're in a class with two students, and one puts his/her name on the eval...you get the idea)
- Email it to me. Again, to maintain anonymity, please email it from the following gmail address: hammond.feedback (password = "feedback"). So: go to gmail.com, log in, hit compose, address it to me (thomaschammond), attach the file, and send it.
- While you're doing course evals, I'll be helping people one-on-one with any remaining final portfolio issues.
- Instruction: How to be an awesome teacher, part 12
- Classroom management
- I have a boring powerpoint to talk about it, but let's first do some exploring/role-playing--we'll address most of the points and it will be far more fun and interesting. The groupwork will require you to look at the following classroom management scenarios
- And then we follow that with the boring powerpoint. But hopefully this will go faster and prompt more interesting discussions now that we've gotten our heads in the game.
- Administrator, parent, and community management
- The name of the game here is Know Your Issues and don't be blind-sided by them
- Administration
- "You're two weeks behind on the pacing guide...your students won't do well on the end-of-year test!"
- "You're receiving two new ESL students tomorrow."
- "Wait -- you showed WHAT movie in class yesterday???"
- "Your teaching needs to be research-based."
- Parents
- "My son/daughter can't learn given the way you teach."
- "I don't want my son/daughter reading that novel."
- "What can my son/daughter do to pass the class?" (The student in question has an F and the marking periods ends next week....)
- "You're always picking on my son/daughter."
- "Do you have kids? Well, if you did, you'd understand that..." (insert excuse)
- Community
- "Mr./Ms./Mrs. Smith is too conservative/liberal." (Lots of issues can get plugged in here: attention to Republican/Democratic political stances, discussions of race relations, reference to environmental issues, you name it. Little pitchers have big ears, and the version of events that emerges at the dinner table might not be what you thought you were doing in the classroom....)
- "Mr./Ms./Mrs. Jones doesn't care about kids."
- "I found Mr./Ms./Mrs. Brown's MySpace page, and s/he is a bad influence on our kids."
- And now to think pro-actively
- Open classroom
- Open gradebook
- Standing lines of communication (anonymous, if need be)
- The power of good news
- It's a conversation / We're on the same team
- Paper trails
- Teach the whole student
- Time = Respect
- Objectivity?
- Student discipline via contracts; 24-hour wait time on disciplinary action
- Redemption?
- Seeing yourself through another's eyes
- Keep the ducks in a row:
- You know your stuff (curriculum, content, student policies),
- your planning is complete (curriculum map, unit plan, lesson plan),
- your curriculum-instruction-assessment alignment is tight, and
- your communication is steady and professional and multimodal (on paper, via telephone, in person)
- Life-long learning
- Content journal
- Reflective journal
- Lesson plan reflection
- Professional associations
- Conferences
- ...things like Tapped In
- Caveat Magister: None of this guarantees that things will be all rainbows and hearts and unicorns and stars. Or fat paychecks. But it will let you do a job in which you
- play with ideas everyday
- do something positive every day
- influence young people every day
- question assumptions every day
- grow and change over time, if you're doing it right!
- Graduation --anyone feel like giving a speech?