New School Year Update

I worked this morning with my supervising principal, and the Dean of our special education department to get my schedule straight. I will be doing the Precision Teaching gig half time (3 periods per cycle; 2 on one day, and 1 on another). I have one block of Functional Academics the last period of the day every other day.
That left 3 periods... Imagine my surprise when my principal said that he, our Dean, and head principal were thinking about having me create materials and work with other teachers to integrate technology within the special education department!! I will get to spend one block, every other day, doing that exact thing.
I think it was here a few days ago (or not, as I don't see it) that I said that I didn't know of any jobs that would let me work with students, give me time to create materials, and attend conferences. I am totally happy to settle for 2 out of 3 of those, especially since I will get to attend a conference this year!
I am already looking at ways to make this work... I had thought about working with our AT person on another grant opportunity, as well as submitting a continuation grant (This Is My Life: Kicked Up!) to the Loudoun Educational Foundation (LEF). LEF was the organization that provided the grant for our digital camera project (This Is My Life: Using Digital Media To Increase Literacy Skills) in the 2006-2007 school year. We haven't decided yet, but we're looking at either podcasting or video as the addition to the project this year.
I've also been talking about my own ideas for this year, and some of the other teachers were interested.
One of the goals for my school this year is to increase the use of data collection to determine outcomes for students. I think that we could make our lives a little easier for some types of data collection if we use Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis and photo sharing. The students could respond to various prompts in blogs, thus allowing us to collect running writing samples for the whole year. They could post materials created on their wiki, and demonstrate all kinds of skills this way, and with photo sharing. Teachers benefit, because they could literally look at student work ANYWHERE, and not have to lug home 80 folders full of writing.
We may also use a wiki and blog to communicate information about Key Club to members. I offered to give space over at my classroom blog, and also on the classroom wiki.
Lastly, but certainly not least, we have received all the information from Microsoft for the Innovative Teacher Forums. I just set up my personal space on the Forum, and linked back here, and to my professional wiki.

Bridging the Gap with Digital Media

I had posted at the beginning of this week about two of the in-service sessions that I was particularly looking forward to attending: Echoes and Reflections, and Reading in the Reel World, with John Golden. I was not disappointed with either session, and took away a whole lot of information and ideas on using digital media with my students!

In Reading in the Reel World, we were shown various techniques for having our students use documentaries as they would a textbook. We were shown specific things to help our students use the digital media appropriately, and to encourage critical thinking about media... Part of that process was a discussion on whether or not documentaries are always completely non-fiction, and how things are sometimes done to enhance the mood of the watcher, which may or may not necessarily have been how the event really happened. This is similar to teaching students to be wary about advertisements they see, or using material from the Internet as fact. The other piece that I found most useful was where Mr. Golden shared how he had his students make their own documentary about school. He had a student use a digital camera to take pictures in the classroom for a whole period, then dumped the pictures onto an accessible area on the school network. Students worked in PowerPoint, and added a music clip that fit their pictures. Each documentary was less than 3 minutes long, but the messages they conveyed were real. It was very interesting to see students using the same pictures as peers, but with completely different ideas and music, and therefore a completely different message.

The Echoes & Reflections session was also well worth attending, and we did receive complete copies of the curriculum for our use. I don't know how much of the lesson plans I'll be able to use, but I might be able to use some of the digital media clips and the photographs they provided us with. The curriculum includes a DVD of about 21 short clips that were done with the Shoah Foundation at the University of Southern California.

The message here, at least for me, is that using digital media helps our students learn about events, and then connect the events to things in their own lives. And that is truly comprehension: without that connection, there is no point in the information. I'm a lover of trivia, but that cannot be our goal in teaching. Our goal has to be that students will understand what we share with them. If we do not make that effort, we may find problems later on in our lives. Okay, enough doom & gloom...

Last Wednesday was the first day back for teachers in my district. Our students come back the Tuesday after Labor Day. I've been in this district for 3 years, and, call me strange, but I actually enjoy the way that my district structures the professional development. We spend several days in our school, and have 2 or 3 days where we have some sessions that we can choose from. This year, I have 2 sessions I'm particularly looking forward to: one is Connecting Generations, which explores (and hopefully gives us pieces of!) the new curriculum that deals with the Holocaust from USC Shoah Foundation, and the other is with John Golden, the author of 'Reading in the Reel World: Teaching Documentaries and other Nonfiction Texts. I'm excited about both of them because they reflect how I teach.
Last Saturday, I also attended the required training session for new Precision Teachers. I wish I were as excited about Precision Teaching as I am about the possibilities for the other two sessions.
The facilitator for our Precision Teaching training described it as an intervention that can be used to teach any kind of information. People who are familiar with the traditional ABA and TEACCH programs used with children with autism will recognize a lot of similarities in Precision Teaching. I won't insult anybody by saying the program is bad, and doesn't work: it does work, and works very well for some students. Our facilitator described Precision Teaching as one of her passions, and I respect that. How could I not, given that I often feel like I'm the odd one out in what I believe and in how I teach?
To continue this thought: I was surfing the web earlier this evening and looking at various materials, resources and comments for Precision Teaching. I found a lot of sites for worksheets and ways to make new worksheets, including a technology tool that I've used for years, and absolutely love: Schoolhouse Technologies worksheet generators. I've been using their products forever, and have participated in many beta testing sessions. You can even find a few of my word lists here.
But, there wasn't a whole lot in the list that excited me, and I was really worried by a few of the things I read, including a video I saw about various math education methods. There are always people who are more enthusiastic about things than others, so I need to remind myself to take some of what I saw with a grain of salt.
But, after I stopped looking at Precision Teaching materials, I went looking for something that was more, well, me. It didn't take me long to find what I was looking for in a blog attached to WOW2.0.
The very first blog I read discussed using a podcast from Business Week about the future of employment and jobs. It explained that students need to understand why we want them to learn and use something, and how it fits into the real world. It seemed to insist on problem solving as a method (something a few of the more evangelistic Precision Teaching sites decried as really, really bad). This, clearly, is one of my passions...
So, how do I meet the requirement for 50% of my job this year, which requires precision teaching, and still be a teacher that integrates technology, web 2.0, and creativity? I have to do 3 periods of precision teaching, which only leaves me 2 periods of other kinds of teaching. Suggestions are welcome...

Information About Me

As a part of one of my graduate classes from this past summer, I learned how to use various tools for multimedia presentations. Like many graduate classes, you're required to develop a project that proves you've learned the material (Lovers of standardized tests take note: requiring people to show you that they've learned something is a higher order thinking skill than just bubbling in a test sheet).
I decided to create a project for my students to do that was tied to our history and English units. We were going to do this at the beginning of the year, but then I remembered that I really wanted to sign my class up for Salute to Seuss from Jennifer Wagner. We did the Lucky Charms graphing last year, and I know that my students learned a whole lot about data collection and graphing from the project. I know it because they were able to use the skills from the project later, and talk about data collection via Lucky Charms in a logical fashion. So... we'll likely get to this second quarter, because we'll be doing a similar project for Seuss. And that might be a good thing, because we can do a group project for Seuss and have everybody learn what to do, then do this one.
I also want to point out that this didn't start as a video. It started in PowerPoint. I exported the slides using 'save as picture' (PPT 2003 and above), then dropped them in PhotoStory 3 (free software for XP from Microsoft). That was the easy part. The soundtrack was a lot harder and not entirely what I was looking for. I'll have to find a better way to retain the sounds in a PowerPoint or just remember to record the sounds directly into the slide show software.
Here's the video...


I'll put the supporting materials here: All About Me Materials
The checklist that is on the page is adapted from one created by Attainment Publications, and can be found the 'Building Life Skills Portfolios' book.

Enjoy!

Blogfolios, Take 2

I redid a bit of the blogfolio presentation and wanted to repost it. I am still not quite sure where the extra "clouds" are coming from on some of the pages, but at least the text shows up in all the right ones now.
I really would like some comments about the plausibility of this idea. I'd also love to hear about any tools that people think would be useful for this other than what I've already listed.

My first effort at making an entry for the blogfolio has been difficult, and not at all as easy as I thought it was. Creating the PowerPoint was dead easy. Recording the sound bites was easy. Attaching the sounds to the PowerPoint slide, also easy. The problem came when I tried to turn the PowerPoint with its slides into something that I could post in a blog! Its been a huge time sink (remember the other post I made today, where I said anybody who knows me could vouch for a few things? Another one of those things is that I'm a perfectionist; I just can't bear the thought of turning in a project that didn't come out the way I wanted!). Right now it looks like I'm going to have to burn it to a CD to turn in for my graduate class tomorrow night...
Magi

We're baaack... Part 2

Apparently, our overall "fun theme" for the year will be based on The Simpsons. When the show started, I definitely wasn't a fan. I can't say that I watch it glued to the TV now (actually, I don't think I watch much of anything glued to the TV screen!), but I do appreciate more of the humor. And, in my own personal form of 'preja vu' (deja vu that happens before you knew about it being deja vu), I named the blog that my students will use 'Doughnut Drive'. That's the name of the hallway where our classroom is... and on one side of our blog is a great picture of Homer Simpson trying to eat this huge doughnut! I just loved that!
Okay, so right about now you're waiting for me to tell you how all of this ties into web 2.0...
The videos, the homer simpson tie-in, are all available to people to use because of web 2.0! Schools have always shown "inspiring videos" during in-services. But, in the not-so-distant past, those videos were put together by people who were assigned this as a job. People who were usually in marketing or PR, maybe an AV department. An ordinary teacher, person, parent could not have done this just 5 years ago!
I love the amount of information that is out there and available. I like being able to go to Google and type in a few words and find all of this information. I love being able to go to the website for my University, and looking at the entire selection of journals that is available without ever leaving my futon and my cat. I've been attending Johns Hopkins in various forms (with some breaks) since 1999. My first master's degree is from Hopkins in transition planning & severe disabilities. With luck, I'll finish a second degree (Certificate of Advanced Graduate Study, another 30 credits) in curriculum design and assistive technology at the end of Fall semester. I've never set foot in the Eisenhower library on the Homewood campus. Not one time. I used to go to a closer community college library, but now I don't even have to do that. I just load up my VPN software, type in my password, and convince the library's computer that I am really in the library.
Lovely. Absolutely lovely. And now, I'm going to go fix a slideshow in Slide Share, and then finish & post the final project for my graduate class this semester.

We're baaack...

Today was the first day of school in my county for teachers. Anybody that knows me can probably vouch for several things: I absolutely cannot sit in a meeting and do nothing. At the very least, I have to take notes. And, that's what this entry really is: a description of my "notes" from our first day of in-service. These particular notes are mostly about how I saw the people who were providing our in-services using Web 2.0... and maybe not even knowing that they were using it!
In the morning, we watched the famous (infamous?) video, Shift Happens. I've seen it before: I think I first saw it during a graduate class last spring, and I know I saw it in another graduate class after that. I enjoyed seeing it again, but also seeing the reactions of other teachers that were in the auditorium with me.
For those that might not have seen it:


In the afternoon, we viewed the Ordinary People video. As with Shift Happens, I'd seen it before, and enjoyed seeing it again. This time, I remembered to write down the name of the song because its one of those songs you like to use for slide shows of your students doing cool stuff. I like the version we watched today better than the one I'm going to post here, but I cannot seem to find that version...

Innovative Teacher Forum

I have to start off this post with a bit of a brag... Just before the school year ended, a graduate instructor provided information on the Microsoft Innovative Teacher's program. It is a combined effort between Microsoft and various other agencies, including the 21st Century Thinking Skills folks. I talked to the assistive technology specialist that works with me in my classroom, and we decided to give it a whirl. The application was many, many hours of work between the end of school and the first part of July when we submitted. And then we waited... and waited... and waited... We were certain that we'd never be chosen, and listed all the reasons why. Our school district is too small, we'd focused heavily on students with multiple special needs and cognitive impairments, etc. I'm thrilled to say that we were wrong! We were one of the groups that

was selected to attend the forum the end of September in Seattle! I was so excited when I saw the email I could barely speak. The project we submitted was our digital camera project that we did with my class and the resultant video tours and "thank-you gifts" we gave to our community work-sites.

Assignment Sheets

These were nearly an act of desperation... the middle school I was at gave each student a planner. The planner was required in classes, but none of my students could write small enough, spell well enough, or scribe quickly enough to make use of them. I created one that was larger (and later, one that required the student only circle the type of assignment; I surveyed the other teachers to find out what common homework assignments were). But, the students wouldn't use them. Turns out that they were afraid of being laughed at because their assignment sheets were different. Fortunately, there was another teacher in the department who had an idea: she suggested that we "unbind" the original planners, and hole punch the new sheets, and then rebind them using the original covers. Success!! My students stopped throwing away the sheets, and at least a little more homework was being done.

You can find samples of the Assignment Sheets on my ITCFusion Wiki.

Computer How To's

At the beginning of the last school year, I set professional and personal goals for my classroom. We were required to do this by our principal, and really, its not a new idea. I think, though, that this is the first time I have really put thought into what I've included in those goals and tried to really model my instruction for these goals.
One of the goals was to increase the independence of my students in the use of technology. I know that my students benefit from using technology, but surely some of that benefit is diluted if I'm setting them up on the computer. One of the other goals that I had for last year (which is going to carry over this year, and I'll post about later) was to improve written communication in my students.
The result of this was a set of 'computer how-to' sheets that lived in bright yellow paper folders next to the computers in the classroom. We had some mild success with them; of course, my students with learning disabilities picked up on using the cues a lot faster than my students with other disabilities. I think that some of that success issue is that with many of my students, they are just not used to having to look at something to get help instead of sitting there with a confused look and waiting for me to notice. We'll be using the how-to sheets again this year...

You can see the various Computer How-To sheets here on the ITCFusion Wiki.

Its About Time

I have been telling myself that I should create a more personal blog for several months now. My students blogged for a bit last year, and I contributed a few entries to their efforts. And, toward the end of the year, I explored LiveJournal as part of a graduate class. In June, I signed up to blog with my students on David Warlick's site and added 3 blogs to the RSS feed on my Google homepage. Yet, I still put off creating my own blog.
Then, it happened. In the space of a few days, I had requests for various materials I had created or discussed on two different listservs. I've always just sent the materials to other people via email. That isn't a bad choice, but what if other people on the list also want the materials? Then I send email to more and more people. I reasoned with myself, and decided that if I (finally) created that blog I was thinking about, I could share things more easily.
But, really, that wasn't a good enough reason to create a whole blog. The final deciding point came when I talked to another teacher friend and asked her to look over a proposal for something I want to do with my students. She is willing to do it, but she isn't a special education teacher, and she doesn't use technology in her classroom the way I do. At which point the proverbial light bulb came on, and said, "Put it on the blog! Put it ALL on the blog!"....