Category Archives: my classroom

Tending to the (Answer)Garden of Dreams

Date
Posted by
Comments1

dream answergardenMy students are in the midst of creating a Dream Scene Digital Story Project (which I can outline another day) and yesterday, as they were making the transition from creating an image in Paint to trying out Photostory (not one of my 80 students has ever used it before), I had them add their “dream or aspiration” to an AnswerGarden I had set up at our classroom blog.

AnswerGarden is a word cloud site that collects words and phrases. I noticed some new features at AnswerGarden that seem new to me. I can now create an administrative password and get the information sent to me via email. I can remove any words from the cloud (a source of concern for us teachers). I can now even send the final information over to Wordle, and let it create one of its beautiful word clouds with the AnswerGarden information (wow — I love that connection!)
dreams wordle 2010
We all got a kick out of how many budding chefs and musicians are in our midst, but I also loved seeing words like “doctor” and “architect” and “lego designer” in there, too.

Peace (in the rich earth),
Kevin

“Comic” Book Recommendations

Date
Posted by
Comments0


I started using Bitstrips for Schools this year and there are a lot of things I like about it. I’ll write about that another time. But one activity I did over the last few days was to ask students to volunteer to create a webcomic book recommendation. Most took me up on it. A lot of them were writing at home. The comics are pretty basic and you can see they are still tinkering with how to use the site. Still, I liked the range of books being recommended and that gives me a bit of insight into what they like to read.

And they got to make comics, which they just loved. Particularly the boys. it seems. The girls got bogged down in creating their own characters. This, I think, is interesting.

Peace (in the frames),
Kevin

The Great Rust-Eating Bunny Hoax

Date
Posted by
Comments1

bunnies news
My classroom does not have a water fountain or a sink. It is without water. When my students ask why, I tell them the truth: my room is right at the point where an addition was put to our school many years ago and somehow, the pipes got crushed. By the time the school figured it out, it was too late and too expensive to fix (or so I am told).

This year, one class said that story was boring and couldn’t I come up with anything better. Well. That’s a challenge, right? I let a few days pass, and then yesterday, I shared out a “news clipping” I found about an invasive species in our area that eats rust and pipes. I showed them the, ahem,  newspaper article (which I created with the Fodey image generator site).

When I got the end of the article, there was some stunned silence. Rust-eating bunnies? Underground in our town? Most of them believed the article was true (it looks like an article, so it must be an article), which led to an interesting discussion about not everything you see on the Web is real.

Then, they really loved the story. And I got their attention.

Peace (in the burrowing bunnies of Crowtopia),
Kevin

Using Videos in Animoto

Date
Posted by
Comments0


I’ve used Animoto many times in many ways over the last few years to showcase work of my students, but I had not yet tried the ability to upload videos into Animoto, and create moving project. Our recent name movies seemed a perfect fit, since Animoto only allows for small chunks of video (I think it is about 20 seconds) which you can edit down to smaller pieces at the site itself. The process was fairly intuitive.

I guess if you had a larger video, you could upload it and then duplicate it a bunch of times, editing different moments to create something a little different. Seems like a lot of work, but it could be done.

I like this new theme they have at Animoto. The folding boxes seemed a nice design fit for a movie of stickfigures.

Peace (on the small screen),
Kevin

Starting the Year with Names in Motion

Date
Posted by
Comments2

Names in Motion 2010 (1) from Mr. Hodgson on Vimeo.

I like to start the first day of school with some fun technology and last year, I had my sixth graders jump headfirst into Pivot Stickfigure to make a movie that included letters in their name. I love that when parents ask “what did you do today,” they can answer, “we made a movie.”

Their only instructions from me are that I want them to include the letters of their name in their short stopmotion movie. What am I looking for? Time to chat with my new students and a sense of who is pretty comfortable with the computers and with trying something new (only one of my students had used Pivot before). I smiled when I heard a boy shout out from the back of the room, “I’m the expert. I can help.”

That’s what I want to hear!

I then grabbed finished movies (a few are still in process) and put them together into longer collections.

Here is one such collection:

Peace (in the names),
Kevin

Do we need an “E”?

Date
Posted by
Comments0

Last year, our school district moved to a standards-based reporting system. Well, that’s not quite right. The middle and high school in our district apparently had the choice to opt out and they did. That’s another story altogether, really. But we in the elementary schools are in the second year of standards-based reporting, which is sure to change again next year with the Common Core standards coming into play in Massachusetts.

One area of contention has been the “E” designation for student achievement, where students are assessed based on how they progressing or meeting the individual curriculum framework standard. The “E” stands for “exceeding the grade level standard.” My sixth teaching team has had many discussions about the E and when it might be warranted. We were very stingy with it and I think I may have given out two or three E’s all of last year. Total. And even there, it felt like I was rewarding students for their overall work and not that they were exceeding the sixth grade expectations. It didn’t feel right to me.

During district-wide meetings last spring about thestandards-based report system and how it was going in year one, a clear message emerged from the upper grades: let’s get rid of the “E” since none of us are teaching curriculum that goes beyond the grade we teach, and figuring out how to justify an “E” makes it trickier than it is worth. Plus, parents of students who traditionally received straight A’s in the old system expect to see straight E’s now.

But the “E” remains in place this year again, as one grade level in particular apparently argued for it to remain (and the designation of achievement levels is standard across all grades). I’m not sure why that one grade has more sway than the rest of us, but I guess it does.

I’m curious to know what others are doing on this issue. Do you have a designation that shows student achievement beyond the standards that are being taught in a grade? How is that determined? Please share your thoughts.

Peace (in the mulling it over),
Kevin

Wordling Our Way into Day One

Date
Posted by
Comments0

I am always curious to know what my new sixth graders are looking forward to and what they worry about. I had them use a Google Survey to gather responses to those two questions and used their answers to generate a few Wordles.

fears 2010

looking forward 2010
Can you tell which is which? Hint: MCAS is our state standardized test and Quidditch is our version of the Harry Potter game.

Peace (in the wordling),
Kevin

Making Webcomics before the School Year Begins

Date
Posted by
Comments0

Normally, as the start of school approaches, I include instructions in my summer letter home that asks my incoming students to write at our classroom blog a bit about what they did over the summer. This year, I am going to have us use Bitstrips for Schools webcomics, and so I changes my writing venue from the blog to our classroom webcomic space. It’s been pretty fun to see what they can do, particularly since they are on their own (for the most part — we don’t start school with kids until tomorrow).

Here is a snapshot of our “classroom” page. You can see that many of them are already creating avatars of themselves.
comic classroom 2010

I hope they view the activity as fun and engaging.

Peace (in the comic world),
Kevin

Environmental Glogging

Date
Posted by
Comments1

envirglogs
Now that I have decided to join in with the Voices on the Gulf project for this coming year, I realized that I needed to go back to some environmental projects from last year and pull some together on a website. These projects were done on Glogster and were part of the culminating work after reading the novel Flush by Carl Hiasson.

The glog projects were built around an interest in an environmental issue, although most seemed to choose endangered animals as their topics. I want to have them on a website because I want to be able to show some examples as we move into doing writing and research around the Gulf oil spill and recovery efforts this year. I see Glogster as one platform for composition by my sixth graders.

Visit the Environmental Glog site.

If you want to learn more about using online poster sites like Glogster, I wrote an article over at Learn NC a few months ago called Digital Posters: Composing with an Online Canvas and created this glog, too.

Peace (in the glogging),
Kevin

Responsibilty, Respect in Online Spaces

Date
Posted by
Comments1

Gazette Article Aug2010

Last week, I  submitted to our regional newspaper, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, which has been running a series of columns under the banner of  “The Aspire Project” around issues of bullying, respect and other issues that came out of two young suicides in our area.  One of those local young people, Phoebe Prince, has been the subject of many national publications and media, particularly since her high school tormentors used social networking spaces to target her. The other, a boy from the big urban center, who also took his own life around the same time is mostly forgotten in the news.

I’ve been waiting for someone to write about the use of online spaces for the Aspire Project. Finally, I couldn’t wait for others, so I wrote my own short essay on the topic of respect and responsibility when it comes to technology.  My attempt here is to urge teachers not to turn their heads away from these online places, and instead, use the use of these sites as a way to foster community and communication. That said, I acknowledge that it is a difficult journey for wary teachers.

Earlier this week, my column hit the front page of the newspaper, and I have received a handful of comments from parents and teachers that I see at my sons’ baseball games, and in our neighborhood, and at camp drop-off. Most are not sure what they need to be doing, nor how to enter into the conversations. One teacher noted that their school forbids most use of technology, so the possibility of online work is almost nil.

I decided to make the piece a podcast, too, and so here it is:

Listen to “Expect Responsibility, Respect in Online Spaces” (note: the podcast essay is about 6 minutes long)

I’m not pretending I have all the answers, but I do believe my last line sums up a lot about my thinking: “We need to be paying attention.”

Peace (in the reflection),
Kevin