For CPS student response clicker lessons and tips, head over to clickers.mrcoward.com.

Soundz!

Posted on March 12, 2010
Filed Under Supplementary Materials, Technology | Leave a Comment

In the previous post, I touted the beauty of The Timer and havoc one might wreak with it upon the psyches of sensitive seventh graders. This is just a quick update to that.

The link at the end of this post will take you to a directory with my stash of timer sounds. You can go find your own on the net — look for .wav files — but here are some to get you started.

Tips:

Change the sounds at random intervals. (Read the Read Me file for how to. It’s easy.)

Surreptitiously crank up the volume after the start sound, so that the alarm sound has maximum impact (sometimes literally).

Try to be talking just before the time runs out, so that they are distracted when it does. Then casually finish your sentence after they scream.

Say, “I never get tired of that,” after they fall out of their desks.

(at the start) Say, “The clock’s running; your mouth shouldn’t be.”

Say, “Excuse me, must be that breakfast burrito,” after the raspberry sound.

After time expires, but before you reset, if you click go you get the start and alarm sounds back-to-back. Kinda fun if you choose your sounds right. Like the raspberry and the scream.

Here’s the sounds stash. Right click on each sound to save as.

The Timer Redux

Posted on March 10, 2010
Filed Under Seventh Grade Behavior, Supplementary Materials, Technology | 1 Comment

This one isn’t exactly a rerun per se…let’s call it more of a rewrite…

This year’s crew has been a bit more, shall we say, trying, than any in recent memory. They’re nice enough for seventh graders and all, but they are really frying my bacon this year. So I have to get my kicks where I can…to sort of…take the edge off.

I devoted a short post to THE TIMER (AKA: THE CLOCK) way back when this whole blog thang started in ‘08, but lately The Timer has been enjoying a bit of a renaissance, so I thought I’d share the wealth again.

Several years ago I started noticing that the incoming seventh graders were very used to getting as much time as they needed to finish warm ups and quizzes and such. The idea of a timed test or quiz was completely alien to them.

I couldn’t cope. At the time, I was using a Gateway Destination setup with a 32″ inch monitor and some fine speakers, so I went searching for a little countdown clock I could put in the corner of the screen to start training these kids to work with/against the clock.

“How much time do you think you need for the warm up? Six questions, five you have to copy… six minutes?”

“Seven.”

“Five.”

“Ok, six.”

The Timer
The Timer

In my class, almost every activity, except the reading/discussion, is timed. In the upper corner of the lcd projection, there is always The Timer. It is such a part of what we do, that when I forget to start it, I hear about it.

“You forgot to start the clock.” (Followed by a chorus of shushing and “Why’d you tell him?”)

The Clock keeps us all moving right along. It allows them to set a pace that gets them done in time. It prepares them for standardized state tests and suchlike. Etc. Etc. But the best part is, The Timer plays a sound when you start…and when time is up. Any sound (.wav file) you want. And that’s where the fun begins.

Right now the start sound is a silly, high-pitched sort of teeheehee giggly thing. It actually sounds like the laugh of a student I had a few years ago. Everybody that year thought I’d taken the sound from her. But it’s the sound at the end that makes it fun.

I have pretty decent speakers attached to my class computer, so when the volume is up, and I choose, say, a screaming man sort of sound as the alarm at the end…well, the result is one of the unheralded perks of teaching middle school. They’re working away on the warm up, and don’t notice that time is running out…and then: Scream! The first few times, early in the year, I’ve had some fall out of their desks. There are inadvertent squeals (from boys too), screams, and almost all of them jump, if I have chosen the right sound.

Earlier this year we started doing more of our warm ups “one-at-a-time,” with the CPS clickers, and the clicker software has a countdown on the screen, so we haven’t been using the Timer as much. But lately we’ve been going old-school on our warm ups (no clickers!), so there isn’t the built-in clicker countdown, and I’ve been breaking out the Clock more often. Maybe it’s because we hadn’t used it so much recently and their immunity was wearing off? Maybe I just found the right alarm sound for this crowd? Anyway, their reactions have been an endless source of enjoyment of late. The collective scream today in one class was much louder than the alarm itself.  Almost rivaled our Pledge of Allegiance scream. I really thought I was going to need a mop in another class.

After a while, everyone gets to know who the jumpy ones are. Sometimes we try to warn them a few seconds before the end, so they can gird themselves (that only works about half the time), sometimes we just watch, and wait.

“We’re in the red zone now (the clock turns red when you’re under a minute), so those of you who are more… sensitive… might want to prepare yourselves.”

(40 seconds later)

“What did you say, I wasn’t lis…”

SCREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAM

Hahahahaha. I never get tired of this.

Every year, before Back to School night, the kids make me promise I’ll use it on their parents. Our BTSN consists of 10 minute periods where the parents follow their student’s schedule, and we give our spiel. I tell the parents that I’m setting a timer so I don’t run long.

Yeah, that’s it.

Click on the picture of  The Timer to go to a listing of files. Right-click on each one and save them all to a folder called timer (or whatever). Read the “Read Me” file for how to change the sounds.

I like to change the sounds at random intervals. Keeps them on their toes.

Integral

Posted on March 8, 2010
Filed Under Ray Bradbury, Teaching | 1 Comment

We were going over this week’s academic words pretest today, and when we got to the word integral, I was searching for a way to differentiate it from inherent, which is another word this week.

“Inherent is sort of like ‘built-in,’ part of the …being of something. Like…you were all born inherently good, unless there was something wrong with your wiring…”

“Like me!” A chorus. Sigh.

“Anyway. Integral is more like ‘part of the structure’ of something. Without that integral thing, it doesn’t work. Like…without your skeleton, you’re just a big blob of Jell-O goo…”

“Eewwww.” (Check out the Ray Bradbury story “Skeleton.” Talk about ewww.)

“What. Ever. Your skeleton is integral to your body. Without it, you don’t really have a body. Integral is also where the word integrity comes from. That ShmartBoard might be nice but, it isn’t integral to this class. We could still have an effective class without it.”

“So what is integral for you in this class?”

“Excellent question, that. Let’s see. Back in the day, when I started here, I didn’t have a computer…Wait, my wife had that old Mac SE over there… 10 inch greyscale screen, Microsoft Word 2.0, and a printer…I think she paid $2700.”

Collective gasp.

“It still works, and it still boots faster than any machine in the school. Anyway, it wasn’t in my classroom, and I mostly used it to type, so…  I didn’t have clickers, obviously, or an LCD projector, or even a whiteboard.”

“Wha?”

“I tried to get them to save my chalkboards when we moved out of the portables, but they didn’t listen to me. I used to love doing the old fingernails thing…”

I’ll spare you the next five minutes of sharing about the varying levels of (in)tolerance for said sound and stories recounting said (in)tolerance.

“So what’s left? You?”

“Nicely done. Actually, me and my overhead. If they took everything away except that, we’d be just fine.”

“But it wouldn’t be as fun…”"

“You’d be surprised. We’ll do a ‘wood bat week’ with no electronics sometime, and you’ll see what’s integral.”

“Noooooooo!”

This all leads nicely into a NY Times Magazine article, about what makes a better teacher. As many of us realized years ago, good schools aren’t built with good “programs” and tougher standards and standardizing the curriculum. Good schools are built with good teachers. They are the integral part. From the article:

“William Sanders, a statistician studying Tennessee teachers with a colleague, found that a student with a weak teacher for three straight years would score, on average, 50 percentile points behind a similar student with a strong teacher for those years.”

The problem is…how do you tell who’s good? Can people be trained to be good teachers, or do you have to be a “born teacher”? Does better pay equal better teachers? And so on…

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=1

Very interesting article.

Here’s an audio version of the Ray Bradbury story:

Ray Bradbury – Ray Bradbury – Skeleton .mp3
Found at bee mp3 search engine
keep looking »
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