What We Look Like (as comics)

New Class Picture: sept 2011
I took my homeroom students onto our Bitstrips for Schools account and we worked (work? naw. we played) on creating avatars so that we could create a webcomic version of our classroom. Note to reader: my students don’t look quite as strange as this. Or at least, they didn’t last week …

Peace (on the funny page),
Kevin

First Day Jitters: What Excited Them/What Worries Them

We had a great first day of school, doing all sorts of activities and making the slow step forward into the school year. One activity that I do with my sixth graders on the first day of school is to get them to write out the things they are excited about and the things they are worried about for the year ahead. We then use Wordle to pull those ideas together. This is what we got. Can you tell which is which?
Worries about Sixth Grade
Excitement for Sixth Grade
Peace (in the words),
Kevin

17,000 Miles: Connecting Students to the World

Yesterday, I gave a version of this presentation at our school district’s convocation. The “gimic” I used was to calculate how many miles my students have “traveled” over the years as they connected and collaborated online with other students and schools. This video was my draft, as I ran through what I hoped I would remember to say in front of an auditorium of colleagues.

Peace (in the miles to go),
Kevin

A Timely Message: Look Forward, Not Backward

We had our first day of Professional Development yesterday for our school district and the day began with presentations by two of the newest school principals: one at an elementary school and another at the middle/high school. The theme of both talks was very forward-looking.

“What year are you preparing your students for?” was the main underling question of both presenters.

They both asked us to think about what we want students to know when they graduate high school, and how can we use curriculum mapping and the new Massachusetts Curriculum Standards to get there. The message also indicated that we need to be going deeper with our curriculum, instead of skimming along the surface of ideas. And the 21st Century Skills that I find so important — collaboration, multimedia composition, and more — were front and center in their presentations, too. That was nice to hear validated at the administrative level, and maybe will give some colleagues an incentive to keep dipping their toes into the waters.

Stacey Jenkins, an elementary principal, talked about the shift to digital curriculum mapping and away from the large binders that sit in many of our classrooms. She espoused the potential of more collaborative curriculum design, and more alignment of scope and sequences across our school district. We’ll see how that unfolds over the next three years, but the idea is great.

“Once you print it out (curriculum), and put it into a binder, it becomes outdated,” Jenkins noted. “We owe it to our kids to map our curriculum in a way that will be easy to change. We need to update our instruction as quickly as updates happen in technology.”

She shared part of this video of Heidi Heyes Jacobs, curriculum mapping guru, talking the same message at a TED conference.

 

Laurie Hodgdon, principal of the middle/high school, acknowledged that teachers must admit that students today learn in different ways and at different paces than when they were a child in the classroom. While she pushed hard on the idea of “rigor, relevance , and relationships,” Hodgdon noted the many challenges that we face, including:

  • Accelerating technology
  • Changing workplaces
  • Globalization
  • Demographic shifts
  • High stakes accountability
  • Motivation of students

I liked the message they sent and it seemed to connect the work we do at the elementary schools with our colleagues at the upper grades.

Peace (in the shift?),
Kevin

 

Getting Ready for First Day: Activity Inventory

Goodbye Envelope 2011
I hate to admit it but I had been back to my classroom only once all summer. Mostly, it was due to logistics — I spend the summer  as main caretaker of my boys and they drive me crazy when I bring them to my classroom. But also, I needed a break from the space itself. Our classroom becomes our home (if you are lucky to have your own classroom) and removing myself from the space is another part of rejuvenation.

Last night, in a fit of stress that I head back to school for Professional Development today and that our students come back on Thursday, I finally headed back to my classroom. The school was mostly deserted (my math colleague was also in his room, so we chatted about vacations, families, Irene and paperwork, and The Game of Thrones) and I tried to be very efficient with my time. Still, I was there for more than two hours and am not yet done.

Here’s what I did:

  • Dug my Mac laptop out of the closet and hooked it up to my Promethean Board. I had a hard time finding my speakers, but I found them and cranked out some Ben Folds (I came to a new appreciation for the song, Rocking the Suburbs). If anyone was knocking on the door, I didn’t hear them. They sure heard me, though.
  • I booted up my desktop PC. It’s chugging these days. Ran updates. So slow…..
  • I moved desks around in a way that I like for the first few days — very traditional: rows.
  • I flipped my calendars from June to September, as if the summer were missing months.
  • I removed all of the old names (so sad) from last year’s class from our mailbox holder and added this year’s names (excited) to it. I hate this job. It seems so simple and yet always takes me longer than I want, and I have little patience for it. Odd, I know.
  • I began to wipe down desks, which were clean when I left but now have crumbs from summer school (my classroom is the main summer school classroom).
  • I took down various “goodbye” signs from the back wall of my classroom. These were made by last year’s students. It was nice to see them. I could not yet pull down the colorful poster (see above) that indicates my room number. Two wonderful girls made it for me over a few weeks time, huddled quietly in the corner. It’s a nice reminder of last year’s class.
  • I pulled out the bound student planners we got at the end of June and made a pile. They look pretty good. We’re all about organization in sixth grade so student planners become a lifeline for many students.
  • I visited my file entitled “First Day Activities” on the PC, and tweaked it a bit before printing it out. This year, instead of bringing my homeroom on Pivot stickfigure, I am bringing them into our Bitstrips Webcomic site to create avatars. A little change of pace … The rest stays mostly the same: icebreaking activities, etc.
  • I used our Google Calendar to sign out the Mac Cart for the first day of school.
  • I opened up our electronic gradebook and started to create a class, when I realized that maybe one of my colleagues had already done that (and I could just import). Bingo! My science colleague beat me to the punch. I imported all that she had done and was finished in minutes.
  • I printed out the class lists for my four classes (about 80 students) and began assigning lockers to my homeroom students.
  • I finished updating our class weblog — The Electronic Pencil — and our online homework site to reflect the new year. I weed out some posts from the previous year but also keep a few as teasers for the year ahead.
  • I scrambled around to find the packet of new Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks (which are our new version of the Common Core standards) because I know we are spending much of the day today working the start of curriculum revisioning for our district. Phew. I found it, and began thumbing through it again. I have some ideas for how to make changes to my curriculum. Still pondering it …..
  • I shut off the lights and headed home.

Peace (in the prep work),
Kevin

 

Book Review: Edible Secrets

Somewhere on another website that I was reading, this book — Edible Secrets: A Food Tour of Classified US History — was recommended as a graphic novel, and that is not quite right. Sure, there are graphics in it. There are images of classified files and other assorted images.

But I would not term it a graphic novel, per se.

Instead, this small, fascinating non-fictional book by Michael Hoerger and Mia Partlow is an interesting glance at some moments in United States history as seen through the lens of documents once classified as “secret” but now made public through the Freedom of Information Act. And the filter they use to peruse the documents is “food,” as in all of the areas of study — from trying to kill Fidel Castro, to sullying the reputation of Black Panther leaders, to experimenting with drugs on unwitting subjects, to the evidence that leads to the hanging of the Rosenbergs for being Russian spies, to the influence of Coca Cola on global politics in the Middle East — have some connection to food.

It’s a gimmick that works.

The focus of food provides a hook for Hoerger and Partlow to hang on, which is a good thing. It also allows them to inject some much-needed humor into their analysis, which is good, too.  (Some of the charts and maps they create are both hilarious and insightful — including the chart of the various attempts to get Castro over the years. One attempt involves a milkshake.) The files they expose here are pretty interesting — providing an inside look into some of the notes and letters sent between government officials as they sort through politics and intrigue. It’s sort of like a Wikileaks on a smaller scale (and the Wikileaks event happened just around the time of publication of this book, but the authors make references the emergence of electronic databases of secrets, although the files in this book are legally declassified.)

The authors clearly have a political bent, as they examine the documents from the eyes of someone very critical of the government and very critical of keeping secrets. They explain, “If you’ve ever wanted to peek behind the door of a top secret government meeting, or wondered how they broach delicate subjects such as corporate boycotts, mind control, espionage, and assassination attempts, these documents provide you with a voyeuristic insight into the US government.”

They sure do. And it isn’t pretty. This book is worth the read, if only to figure out how doughnuts, ice cream, Jello, milkshakes and popcorn play a role in the secret files of government officials.

Peace (in the secrets),
Kevin

 

 

Using Visually for Twitter Matchups

I’ve been waiting for the new Visually site to get up and running to allow users to create infographics (I have one in mind for our Western Massachusetts Writing Project). Until then, you can do an interesting experiment around Twitter.
First, you can create an infographic of yourself on Twitter. Here’s me, according to Visually’s interpretation of data flow:

You can also go head-to-head with other Twitter users. Here is me versus one of my favorite authors, Neil Gaiman (he kicks my butt, which is perfectly OK with me):

And here I am, going up against one of my National Writing Project friends, Paul Hankins.

Yeah — so that is sort of fun. I can’t wait to tinker more with my own data.
Peace (in the play),
Kevin

(Graphic) Book Review: Nursery Rhyme Comics

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I would think of this collection of traditional nursery rhymes re-imagined by 50 graphic novelists. But I trust the First Second Books to do interesting things, and so, I sat down with my youngest son to give Nursery Rhyme Comics a look. Well, it certainly is interesting and slightly off-kilter and fun, too. My son and I were giggling as we read together.

As Leonard S. Marcus notes in his introduction to this witty graphic collection, “The comics we discover in these pages are new-made fantasies spun from the whole cloth of fantasies we thought we knew, the old-chestnut rhymes that beguile in part by sounding so emphatically clear about themselves while in fact leaving everything to our imagination.”

That’s for sure.

There is whimsy here, and lovely artwork from artists such as Roz Chast and Gene Yang and Richard Thompson and Jules Feiffer, and the stories that unfold in the graphics here enhance or even replace the traditional nursery rhymes. Let 50 graphic novels and comic artists run amok with tradition and what you get is a chaotic wonderment such as Nursery Rhyme Comics. Each “story” is only a page or two — no more than three — and it’s hard to believe that the artist’s style could be established in such a short amount of time, but it is.

I’m not sure who the audience is for this collection but I imagine some elementary students would get a kick of the re-envisioning of traditional nursery rhymes (some of which I had never even heard and had a difficult time singing to my son — I had made up plenty of my own melodies — somehow, I don’t think the artists here would mind all that much).

Peace (in the frames),
Kevin