Vertical Collaboration and the Crazy Dictionary

Frindle: Words from Mr. Hodgson on Vimeo.

Today, we will be jumping on our class wiki site and students will be adding newly-invented words to an ongoing collaborative project: constructing a dictionary of made-up words. It’s called collaborative because since 2005, my students have each been adding one or two words every year to the Crazy Collaborative Dictionary wiki site (and adding podcasts the last few years). We now have about 500 words on the site, and another 80 or so will be added to the mix this year.

What I find interesting is that many of my current students have older siblings who also took part in the Crazy Collaborative Dictionary, which means they are collaborating across time. This is one of the beauties of an online space – the collaboration can go horizontal (across class) and vertical (across time).

They began their work last week as I read parts of the book Frindle by Andrew Clements to them. A fair number had read the book when they were younger, but there are some wonderful sections in there about the power of words and language. We then talked about William Shakespeare and his impact on our language even today. We spoke about the framework of Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet and other plays, and the foundation they have laid for so many plot devices in movies and books today. And we talked about how Shakespeare introduced hundreds of new words and phrases to our language, finding gaps between what he wanted to say and what words were available to express that meaning.

I have shared some of the newest words in the Oxford English Dictionary from 2010:

And showcased some past words from the Crazy Dictionary:

Today, they will get on the wiki, add their words, create a podcast of their word and definition, create a wall chart of their new words and begin to have fun with this invented language.

Who knows what words will emerge today?

Peace (in the language),
Kevin

The Flow, The Rain and the Book: Glogster Presentation Tools

Our kids have been fully immersed in Glogster.edu lately, as I introduced them to the site and got them experimenting, and then my science teaching colleague had them using their accounts to create projects around engineering bridge design, and now I have them working on some independent book poster projects.

One thing we did do this year is we highly and repeatedly stressed design elements: use of color, use of animation, use of font, use of clip art, etc. Both of us showed them Glogs that were well-designed and not-so-well-designed, and sparked discussions about “what worked and what didn’t work” for us as viewers of the work. We both think these discussions and reminders have had an impact, as we see a higher quality of work going on this year with Glogster (where students can easily get too wrapped up in the “this is cool” factor).

Not long ago, Glogster rolled out some ways to collect glogs in your “classrooms” and present them as a entire package. The other day, I started to play around with the three tools: the book, the rain and the flow. They are basically the same idea, but with slight little twists.

If you are on Glogster.edu, you can find the Presentations link right on your dashboard. It’s pretty easy to set up a Presentation, as you just drag Glogs from your classrooms into a tool box and choose the style of presentation you want. The site then kicks out the link and embed code for you. This is one of those innovations where teachers asked, and Glogster responded.

Here are some of the Bridge Projects in each of the formats.

The Flow
You need Flash plugin!
The Rain
You need Flash plugin
The Book
(which doesn’t come with embed code, I guess. That’s because it shows a full scale version of each glog in order.)

Personally, I like The Flow version the best, although I can see the appeal of The Rain, as glogs drop from the sky in a very dramatic way. The Book is neat and straightforward, and would be good for class presentations. What I like is this will easily allow me to share our glogs at our own online sites, for parents and students to view.
Peace (in the sharing),
Kevin

Reading Assessments: Time (Well) Spent?

Reading Assessment Levels 2011
We are in our second year of conducting Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark Reading Assessments as part of a Literacy Initiative. While most teachers have a class of about 20 students to assess, I teach 77 students. I’ve been keeping track of the time I have had to spend on average for each assessment because the F/P folks say you should be able to winnow it down to about 20 minutes per student, once you know the system and have a good baseline for beginning (based on the assessment from the prior year).

If you are unfamiliar with Fountas & Pinnell Benchmark:

  • There is a box of levels books
  • Each level has both fiction and non-fiction text
  • A student reads aloud a portion and then read the rest, silently
  • The teacher marks for accuracy during read-aloud
  • A discussion follows around comprehension related to information from the book, about the book and beyond the book (inference)
  • You find an independent reading level, an instructional reading level and a hard reading level

But I am still finding it takes about 40 minutes per student. And even when I received some help from one our most experienced reading assessment specialists in our school, she was able to assess just four students in three hours time. So I know it is not just me. The silent reading of the upper level texts takes some time for kids, and you can’t rush them. You just have to wait them out.

A little calculation here: 77 students x 40 minutes = 3080 minutes, or a little over 51 hours of reading assessment testing. For me and my students. That means time I am not in the classroom, either, since although F/P folks say you can set up in the back of the classroom while the other students are working independently, that doesn’t work for older students. The readers become very self-conscious and the rest of the students try to listen in, ruining the element of unknown text.

Yesterday, I finally finished my last student (and I can say this, with all the irony you can read into it, given my online connections: I am sick and tired of hearing about the Internet, which is the topic of one of the higher level books in the assessment. I am also a bit weary of tsunamis, and living through the Blitz, and many of the other fictional stories in the set.)

So, is this data collection valuable?

Yes, definitely. Not only am I getting a much deeper glance into the individual reader, I am seeing the bigger picture based on the data collection (which I am collating with other data points, such as our state’s standardized testing results). If you look at the graph above, you can see that most of my students are solidly in the right instructional level. I now have a subset of struggling readers and, just as important, a group of readers that need more challenges.

Yesterday, for example, I had two readers who were like mirror opposites of each other. One of them read fluently, with almost no mistakes or errors, but then could barely answer any of the comprehension questions. The other stumbled as they read, made many errors, but then soared through the comprehension questions, for the most part. Which is the stronger reader? It depends, right? But I now have a much clearer picture of them as readers, thanks to the assessment.

I also have a clearer picture now of which students are struggling in sixth grade. Of course, I already knew much of that, based on work in class and discussions with colleagues, but here, the data fine-tunes those insights and should give me specific areas that I can work on with those students in the lower brackets of reading levels. (We’re still in training on how to interpret all of the errors in the system, however. That work will lead to development of intervention for us in the upper grades; reading intervention programs are now confined to the lower grades)

And, as we move farther into the year, particularly around independent reading, I can have a much better informed say in what level of books they should be choosing, based on the Instructional Levels. I have a basis for saying “you know, that book looks a little too easy for you” or “that book may be a bit hard, but give it a try and see how you do.”

The downsides of all this, however, is that during the assessments, I am not in the classroom during those dozens of hours of testing (although I grab students during non-class times and I have had substitutes and fellow educators fill in, and two colleagues helped with some of the assessments), and so the pace of learning slows during these cycles (We’re supposed to do it again in June) and unfortunately, there is no extension of the F/P reading system in the regional middle school where my students head next year. Last year, they told me they didn’t even want to see the data I had collected (that still irks me).

But yesterday, in the hallway, our principal stopped me and said that may be changing. The Literacy Initiative and its professional development components are now extending up through eighth grade (as opposed to stopping with us here in sixth grade).

So, there is some hope.

Peace (in the data),
Kevin

Eponym Inventions: We Are What We Create

Hodgohat Music Cloud
We’re in the midst of learning all about the origins of words in the English Language and this week, we plunged our way into Eponyms (words that have someone’s name or part of their name in them.) As a writing prompt, I had them invent something (machine, food, animal, whatever) and then name the thing after themselves. They had to do a sketch drawing, with labels, and then write a brief description of their eponymous inventions.

They had great fun with the activity, and they shared out yesterday. The inventions included time travel machines, odd food snacks, writing utensils that work almost like magic, beasts with assorted parts from other animals, and the perennial homework contraption.

As always, I came up with my own, inspired by being tired of having to have headphones or ear buds on to listen to music. I always wondered: what if we could create a music cloud around our heads? Thus, the Hodg-o-Hat Music Cloud (trademarked, so no stealing my ideas, man!)

Peace (in the cloud),
Kevin

What Seems Funny Now …. Online Reputations

reputation
A conversation last week with students had me revising some of my lesson planning yesterday in a way that I won’t ever regret. The conversation was about my sixth grade students and their online lives, and how the things they do now, today, might impact the things they want to do tomorrow. I know a lot of high schools are working this idea of online responsibility and reputation into their curriculum (right?) but I need to expose my students, too.

This all began as we were beginning our work with Glogster, and setting up accounts for students.  I had already done most of the legwork but I wanted to show them how to change their passwords and how to edit their profile in our closed system of our classrooms. I told them that I wanted to see only first names and last initials.

“Why not our last names?” asked one student.

Here, I went into my routine of explaining how, even in a closed online system like our Glogster site and even our Bitstrips Webcomic site, I want them to use only first name, last initial so that they get “used to never identifying who you are online.”

“What about Facebook?” this student quickly countered. A few heads nodded in the room. I thought back to a day earlier, when I was at our school’s Facebook site and noticed one of my students who had “liked” the site and read with dismay his full name (he is only 12 years old).

I launched into an impromptu discussion then about the rules of Facebook (no one under 13 is allowed to have an account), about privacy issues around personal information, about safety issues, and then ended the conversation with a suggestion that any student on Facebook should consider getting off it until they are 13 and they have their parents’ permission to get back on. (I didn’t ask how many were on Facebook without their parents’ knowledge, which I am sure is a few.)

But it bugged me that I wasn’t better prepared for that discussion. And it bugged me that clearly, some parents were not having these discussions at home with their children.

When it comes to online identity, it’s clear that our kids are not even thinking about it. They jump in, explore, post and comment, create and publish — all the things that I as a teacher want to nurture — but they do it without a single thought to what they are doing, and what tiny digital scraps of themselves they are leaving behind. While some students “construct” online versions of themselves (with avatars, with profile information, etc.), I don’t believe many of them are doing it with forethought. It’s just something cool they can do, so they do do it. What we want is a reflective stance, so that they choices they make have meaning and value, and come from the concept of “this is who I am online.” For my students, this rarely happens, as far as I can tell.

So, yesterday, we spent some a large chunk of time talking about why we protect our identity when in online spaces and strategies that we can use to cover our digital tracks. We began with the safety issue — of the “creeps” who use online sites to do creepy things — and I talked about how those events will get big headlines in the news, but are in reality very rare. Which is not to say things never happen, but they are rare. My message: don’t be afraid – be cautious. Be alert. Be thoughtful.

Then, we talked about the bigger topic of Protecting Online Reputations. I could see this was something very few of my students had ever even considered — that the things they are posting today might have an impact on their lives tomorrow, or a few years down the road. I showed them the CommonCraft video Protecting Online Reputations in Plain English, which does such a nice job of addressing this issue in a balanced way. One thing I like is that the video talks about the responsibility of protecting reputations falls not only you but also on us — the circle of friends who might post a picture or video or something inappropriate without our knowledge.

A paraprofessional in one of my classes who has a son who is an athlete at our district high school explained, too, that coaches, the vice principal and others scour Facebook for the student athlete accounts, and any inappropriate pictures or videos or writing that does not conform to schools standards has been grounds for dismissal from sports teams. That drew shocked sounds from the class.

And, I noted, what seems funny today might not seem so funny in a few years, and maybe won’t be any laughing matter when they are sitting in a job interview and that joke gets pulled up on a potential employer’s screen. (I know getting a job seems far away for them at this age, but still …)

We then brainstormed some ideas for how we can protect ourselves and our reputations when we go online:

  • Come up with good passwords (I think this will be a topic for another day)
  • Share concerns with a trusted adult (parent, teacher, etc.)
  • Don’t post inappropriate content (pictures, videos, etc.)
  • Remember your responsibility to your friends when you post information about them
  • Remember that nothing is temporary (search web crawlers make archives of everything)
  • Use the “privacy” option in networking sites so that only invited friends can view your content
  • Don’t use technology (instant messaging, email, networking) to “flame” or bully others
  • Don’t use an actual image for your avatar
  • Keep your last name private

And this is important: I balanced all of this alarming talk with the positive elements of the online world. There are so many potential great things, and more on the horizon, that one should not be fearful of doing anything. But we users need to make sure that the image of ourselves, and our reputation, is something we create, and is not created by others.

I suggested a bit of homework to them: Google yourselves and see what you find. And then, do it again in six months. And then again, in another six months. Keep track of your digital footprints.

Peace (in the reputation),
Kevin

Peeking Inside Reader Response Journals

We’re in the midst of an independent reading unit and this weekend, I finally got around to reading through the student reading journals. I’ve been pushing hard for them not to summarize what they have read, but to take a step deeper into reflection and make predictions, judgments, connections and more as they are reading.

While a few still can’t seem to make that next step (a predictable few, unfortunately), most of my students have used the models from earlier in the year for their reading responses. They are asking questions of the writer, wondering about the motivations of characters, analyzing setting, and connecting the stories and characters with their own lives. For me, this demonstrates good evidence of active reading.

Here are some sentences that I pulled out of the journals:

  • A connection I am starting to make is that all things we do affect everything. (SkyClan’s Destiny).
  • She (the librarian) found him (cat) huddled up in a tiny ball, in the library book return box. When I read that, my heart sank. (Dewey the Library Cat)
  • I think the concept here in this novel are like problems in the real world, so it helps me to understand the book better. (City of Ember)
  • From what I’ve heard, Tom, the main character, may be a bit of a devious person. (Adventures of Tom Sawyer)
  • A lot of people could relate to this scene, where you get mad at someone and you say stuff you later regret. (No Small Thing)
  • I want to save this quote because it reminds me of how my dog sleeps because when he sleeps, he looks dead with his tongue hanging out. (Eggs)
  • … his name, Smoke, leads me to say that he is not a very good influence. Just by the name, the author expresses to us how he is bad. (Scat)
  • He is adventurous, like me. He is courageous, like me. He is fast, unfortunately — not like me. (Fablehaven)
  • I found an error (in the book). It says Ron’s bike is a YZ80. It says it would not start because of a dead battery but it’s a kickstart. Kickstarts never need a battery. (Dirt Bike Racer)
  • I am really getting a good picture of it in my head. (Swindle)
  • This book is giving me good ideas for my own writing (Maximum Ride: School’s Out Forever)

Peace (in the reflecting),
Kevin

Laughter and Chatter: Remembering Kindergarten

Kindergarten files
We had one of the funnest, most laugh-infested Circle of Power (Morning Meeting) sessions in my class the other day, as one of my sixth graders brought in a book that she and a bunch of others published when they were in Kindergarten with my colleague, Gail Poulin. (See her wonderful class blog and her own reflective blog).

My students shared, with permission of the others, drawings and stories they had either written or had transcribed. As is often the case with Gail, the stories were nicely published together. The theme for book was about “I Have  Dream” (inspired by Martin Luther King Jr.) and another packet was when one student is “star of the day,” the others write nice things about them and draw cute pictures.

Even students who did not have Gail for their kindergarter teacher had a great time with looking at the drawings, and listening to the stories, and remembering a bit about their own kindergarten experiences. It was an unexpected surprise, and we all had a good time.

Thank, Gail, for making memories that can impact us up here a the other end of the building. And thanks to the rest of our wonderful kindergarten team, too, who do such a fantastic job with the youngsters in our building. The things they do in those younger grades sets the stage for the learning we try to do in the upper grades. I know I appreciate their hard work.

Peace (down the memory land),
Kevin

Words Are Like Puzzles

words
We’re starting up our unit on The Origins of Words and this week, we worked on the idea of breaking down and rebuilding words based on their prefix, suffix and roots. The aim here is as much about where words come from as giving my students some strategies for deciphering unknown words. “Find the root,” is the mantra I have been giving them.

And then we had some fun, pulling together prefix, root and suffix parts to create words that sound sort of real but are not, and then using the definition of the “parts” to come up with a  definition of the word. We called this activity “Jigsaw Words” because I want them to envision the pieces like a puzzle of meaning.

I then went around with my little voice recorder and all students shared out a word they had created.

Take a Listen to our Jigsaw Words

Peace (in the parts),
Kevin

Working, Playing, Talking Glogster

Yesterday, we spent much of our class period talking about Glogster.edu, which I have shown my students but never brought them into. Now that we are in the midst of an independent book reading unit, with a book project as one of the end products, I wanted them to learn a bit about Glogster, which is an online postering site.

So, we went through the activities yesterday of logging in, changing passwords, adding a little bit of profile information, talking about privacy (Glogster as a closed community), discussing design elements (“just because you can doesn’t mean you should’), and providing some time for just playing around with the site.

Just like last year, they took to it pretty quickly and were having a blast with the site. I heard a lot of “let me show you how to do that” and “I want to change my avatar” and  “I wonder what this does” and “can I do this at home, too, Mr. H?” Yes, of course.

This week, they will also begin doing some research and then building a Glog poster around a type of bridge, as part of a collaboration that I do with our science teacher. Today, in fact, she is going to be showing them some projects from last year, with an emphasis on glogs that did not quite work because they were too flashy, or represents bad design (no student names are on those projects).

Here are two handouts that I provided to my students yesterday. The tutorial was adapted from someone else’s.




Peace (in the glogs),

Kevin

Our Puppet Shows, Published

Taco Week from Mr. Hodgson on Vimeo.

All 22 of the collaborative puppet shows have now been published at our Puppet Shows of Norris School website. Just a reminder: these are original plays planned out and written collaboratively, with original puppets made by students, and performed behind a puppet theater made by sixth graders about 10 years ago.

The Puppet Show Website

I have to say that for the most part, the stories were pretty cohesive and followed a story arc with protagonists and antagonists and most were able to get a moral or theme into the writing. These are the writing skills that I was going after, plus the exploration of the genre of script writing.

I’ll try to share out individual puppet plays during the week (I had this idea of highlighting specific plays) but one thing that was obvious is that in three of the four classes, there was a taco-themed play. And last year, there were some taco-themed plays. And the year before that, too, if I am not mistaken.

Mucho Taco Day from Mr. Hodgson on Vimeo.

What’s up with the tacos?

So, here are the three taco plays from this year, sprinkled like space throughout this post.

Taco Day from Mr. Hodgson on Vimeo.

Peace (with the cheese and fixings),
Kevin