Category Archives: my classroom

I’ve been busy getting myself and my students situated in Week Two but that hasn’t stopped us from creating a podcast for our class Weblog site. The podcast emerged from a writing prompt on Sept. 11, in which we talked about the impact of change on the world from a negative standpoint and a positive standpoint. We brainstormed ways in which the world needs some help and then they wrote briefly about how they would change the world, if they could.

They did a fantastic job and enjoyed hearing their podcasts the next day (and parents have remarked on the wonder of listening in to the work of the classroom)

You can listen, too:

• How to Change the World

Peace (with the power to change),
Kevin

Although we, as teachers, were back in school last week, today is the first day for our students to return and I am antsy and nervous/excited as always. I already know some of my students from my role as Student Council advisor and through a claymation summer camp that some of them took with me in July. But still …

I have a few goals for this year:

• Continue with Youth Radio podcast site (I was interviewed by a writer from The Reading Teacher journal about the project this weekend, so that is pretty exciting to get some recognition on that level)
• I want to try to use a Wiki for kids to create a Make Your Own Ending story, allowing them to map out and craft a story that jumps from wiki page. Still working on the thinking of that one.
• Since I have moved blogging platforms (from Manila to Edublogs) for my classroom site, I want to try to use the blog even more with my students as writers. I think I will miss the ability to thread discussion but will enjoy the ease of use. We’ll see how the students react to blogging. I intend to try a simple activity this week after an introduction to what a blog is and how you use it, and what responsibilities students have as bloggers.
• We are being required to pump more math into the heads of our students this year and I would like to find some ways to use technology for projects that support the math curriculum at our school.

Peace (with prospects),
Kevin

I think my transformation from the old Manila blog platform to Edublogs (wordpress) is complete now that I have set up a classroom blog for my incoming sixth graders. I even added a cute little fishbowl widget to the site. In my annual letter of welcome, I have encouraged my students to post a quick hello message to our writing community (and asked parents to visit, too), and this morning, I moderated the first three student posts.

It’s nice to have everything on one platform and I continue to love Edublogs for all of its options and security and simplicity. I have written before about my move away from Manila for all of our sites at the Western Mass Writing Project, but I still had my classroom site out there. This makes the transformation complete.

Peace (with new platforms),
Kevin

Towards the end of the year — as part of my digital book project — I had my sixth grade students take a final survey and one of my questions: What do you think books will look like in the future?

Here are some of their answers:

• I think books in the future will have people popping out of the pages and talking like a mini-play. In the future, you will not even have to read the books, just listen to them.
• I think they will be little squares that will be digital and project visual images
• Books will be holographic.
• Books will be high-tech and cool, and a printed out copy will have special effects.
• I think books will still be on paper but they will have videos and sounds in them. They will be more high-tech. They will have clear, beautiful pictures and videos of what is actually happening at that moment. And they will have the feelings that people have (example: If the book says, she felt the cold wind on her face, then a chilly wind would come out of the book).
• In the future, you will read books from the computer. I think this because it would save paper and would add cool effects to the stories to make you want to read them.
• I think that in the future, there will still be paper but many books will be digital. I think that the digital book will be very interactive and voice-activated, with movie clips, sound effects, movement and even hyperlinks to different endings.
• In the future, I think books will become automatic. They will have a special speaker inside that will tell you the story.

What strikes me is that so many of these comments suggest a passive reader, and I would hope that a push towards technology integration would allow the reader a larger role into the storytelling (for example: rearrange the story, or add a character, or find a way to alter the shape of the story arc).

Peace (in pages of the book),
Kevin

June brought some really wonderful news to our school. My good friend and collaborator on claymation/movie projects — Mike Flynn — was awarded the Massachusetts Teacher of the Year designation for 2007. Mike is a wonderful second grade teacher whose emphasis on hands-on learning, project-based explorations and embedded mathematics certainly puts him in a top tier of teachers I know.

For the past three years, his second graders and my sixth graders have worked together on claymation movies and it has been a pleasure to develop the project with Mike. He is insightful, flexible and moves towards recognition of the abilities of all the children in his room. Last year, Mike also joined me in presenting a workshop on moviemaking in the classroom at our Technology, Teaching and Writing Conference at UMass (sponsored in part by the Western Massachusetts Writing Project).

He is also a talented musician and he and I have played together as part of an old band of his and he has brought his talents to the stage at our school when I have helped our Student Council organize concerts for Katrina victims and the Asian tsunami disaster. Like me, he finds creative refuge in writing songs.

Mike deserves all of the accolades and is now in the running for National Teacher of the Year (where do I cram the ballot boxes?).

Peace (in celebration),
Kevin