Posts Tagged ‘ teaching with technology ’

Still Here Blogging… (Wiki Wiki)

January 23, 2009
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It’s been a weird week. We had Monday off for MLK. I was on call for jury duty on Tuesday, so I had a sub (sorry, they’re called guest teachers @ Laguna). To make it easy, I had the guest teacher administer the “District Benchmark Exam Part II,” the results of which I’m not sure what to do with. Mostly our English department has been ignoring them, saying the tests don’t really test what they claim to. Also, everyone covers the various standards at various times throughout the year – I don’t do a research paper until the spring, so we haven’t talked much about citing sources – so the idea of testing standards a-g in the beginning of the year, and standards h-m during the middle part, and so forth, just doesn’t work very well. Plus, why do I need to waste three class periods from my precious allotment giving yet another test? Anyway, I had the guest teacher give them the test, and I’ll figure out what to do with the results later. Then we were in the computer lab on Wednesday, to work on the Tom Sawyer Moodle. This is the main reason I’ve been lagging on

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TomWikiSawyerPedia

January 12, 2009
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TomWikiSawyerPedia

A lot of the kids have been having trouble getting through the early chapters of Tom Sawyer. Mostly it’s the vocabulary, though for some it’s the fact that they don’t bother to read it. Once we go over the reading in class, or I explain as we read aloud, they get it, and they like it. Today in class, we’re reading chapter 6 which begins with Tom trying to get out of school by pretending to be sick. “How many of you have ever faked sick to try to get out of school?” Almost every hand goes up. “Nothing changes in 170 years, does it?” They like Mark Twain’s sarcastic sense of humor, and how the goody-goody Sid is obviously a fool in Mark Twain’s eyes too. And they love the pranks. But it’s still tough, especially for the first six or eight chapters. Every year I struggle with how to get them to read it, and get them to get it. This year I’m trying an experiment. Our county office of schools hosts a Moodle server, and I use it a lot in my class. I have a whole Langston Hughes project we do online that includes quizzes and

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Sage in the Chair (CPS still rules.)

November 20, 2008
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Sage in the Chair (CPS still rules.)

A while back, someone (a non-teacher) asked me what my teaching style was. Hmmm. Instructive sarcasm? Peer pressure and public humiliation? Random reinforcement and punishment? Entertainment and containment? Sink or swim? I say jump, you say how high? Teachers know what sage on the stage and guide on the side mean, but those aren’t really me either. All I could come up with on the spot was, “I ask a lot of questions.” I guess these days, it’s something like a high-tech, testing oriented, version of the Socratic method. I pretest by asking a bunch of questions. Then we go over the answers, right and wrong, and discuss why the wrong ones are wrong, and why some of them might have been chosen. Then I explain the correct answers and we practice. Then I ask them more questions to see if they’re getting it. We explain the corrects and incorrects again, and so on. I mean, obviously you gotta spice it up with discussions and videos and quickwrites and mental floss and other activities (remember, almost any variation from the norm is manna to seventh graders), and there are an awful lot of asides and much explaining, but that’s my

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“But it says he!”

September 23, 2008
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The boys are in the church cutting their hair (some of the girls visibly wince as Johnny “starts sawing” on Pony’s hair with the same knife he used on Bob) and killing time with Gone With the Wind. We’re talking about irony and Richard Cory. We go through the poem, and I keep the fourth stanza hidden from them. They laugh when they find out that “crown” means the top of your head, and that in Jack and Jill, Jack really breaks his head. I explain that “clean favoured” means good looking, and they are quick to realize why the poet used “quietly” to describe how he is dressed (“arrayed’). “It means he’s not showing off.” Good. They are also pretty good at getting what “he was always human when he talked” means. Seventh graders are very quick to spot someone “putting on airs” as they said in Tom Sawyer’s time. They tell me it means he’s down to Earth. Nice. Then, after the first three stanzas of description, I stop and ask, “Now, who, in The Outsiders could we compare to Richard Cory? Who is rich, good looking, popular, well dressed, yet down to Earth?” “Sodapop?” Rich? Well dressed.

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CPS RULES!

September 15, 2008
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CPS RULES!

A few years ago I was the lead teacher for an EETT (Enhancing Education Through Technology) grant our site received. Over the course of two years, our site received a truckload of money (like a couple hundred grand) to spend on technology training (from me) and a whole lotta shtuff. Among other things, we bought lcd projectors and computers and wireless slates and some SmartBoards and several sets of CPS “clickers.” The Classroom Performance System consists of software (a tad clunky, but eventually very useful, and getting better), a USB receiver that looks like a flying saucer, and 32 “clickers” that look like remote controls. You make up series of questions (grouped into what they call lessons) with multiple choice answers. Then you project the warm up, quiz, whatever, on your lcd projector, and the kids click the appropriate button on their clickers. You can set a time limit for each question, and it displays (live) who has answered (but not what they answered), and when the time is up, it displays how many kids chose each answer, and optionally, the correct answer. (Beauty for teaching opportunities: “Now, it looks like a lot of you chose B, and that was

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Random Featured Post

Quizzes for Dummies?

A few years ago, while we were reading Outsiders aloud, I was about to give them my usual “reading check” type quiz to make sure they were following along, thinking about what we’d talked about, connecting the literary terms to the examples in the book, etc. I can’t quite remember what my inspiration was (probably just to throw them for a loop like I like to do), but I decided to let them “cheat.” My quizzes on the books and stories we read are always open book, but this time I told them they could take the quiz, not only open book, but “open mouth.” I told them they could talk about the questions and answers as much as they want in any way they want, and decide however they want to, which of the answers to choose. “You can share what you know…or not. You can decide whether to heed the wisdom of the group…or not. You just can’t lie. You can’t knowingly tell everyone the wrong answer on purpose.” One class that day came up with the name Quiz for Dummies. The rest of the periods thought that was a little “mean,” so we’ve stuck with Open Mouth. [...]

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Mr. Coward has been teaching on the beautiful central coast of California since 1989.

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