A tumblog with tips, stories, and discussions about the art of teaching.
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
This page has some descriptions, examples, and infographics of and about the Flipped Classroom. As I’ve been sort of wondering what the Flipped Classroom was, I found it to be a useful resource.
~Aff~
“Noun is a playful artist’s book about words and their definitions. It is like an exquisite corpse with words.
Starting with 27 real English words, each word and its definition has been divided into two parts. By turning the pages, you get to mix and match the word halves to create humorous and nonsensical new words and meanings.
With over 700 different combinations, this book is the perfect item for bibiophiles, lexicographers, writers, and any lover of words.
Here are a few examples of words and definitions you can put together:
whisper + umbrella = whisbrella: A low sibilan utterance for sheltering one from rain and sun.
banana + onomatopoeia = bananpoeia: A large herbaceous perennial tropical plant that bears fruit imitating the sound of the thing or action signified.
muffin + tyrant = muffrant: A quick bread made of batter unrestrained by law or constitution.
nomenclature + ancestry = nomencestry: A system or set of names for things derived from, or possessed by, an ancestor or ancestors.”I need this!
OH GOD I NEED DIS.
WANT
I can see some pretty cool ideas coming from this.
Wow, what a cool book! This combined with a lesson on word parts would be a sweet (and fun!) phonics lesson for a variety of grades!
A good, short look at a school who is taking a leap of faith with its use of technology — allowing students to use their personal smartphones and tablets in the classroom.
Warning: No person-first language.
(Thanks to DrEdWilliams for sending it my way.)
Anchor chart
Here’s one:
Students Using It to Track ResearchAnother possible use is to have your students create boards dedicated to research projects. This is a great way for students who are working on group projects to share resources remotely and then generate discussion based on the research that was completed. The research is easy to use and share, and the visual appeal of Pinterest will make it easier for students to organize the information they collect.
I’m a big “example on the board” person. I have it set and ready to go, discuss it, and then it’s there for the kids as they do their work.
Today, I had an example of what a research note-taking card looks like (done on my awesome, super-size, wipe-off note card) with explanations for each part all around it.
Before I dismissed them to the library, I said, “All this is detailed in the back page of your packet, but if you want to take a picture of it on your way out, go for it!”
And they did. They have cell phones, for one, and we have iPads (however, I turn a blind eye if the camera is ON on their iPad; they’re disabled before distribution. This means they’ve done some jail-breaking.) Shortly after I got to the library, I noticed some of them had taken the picture on their phone, emailed it to themselves, and were viewing the example on their iPad as they worked on their cards.
Win!
there is a reason that this resource is going viral over at Tes. This masterful set of lesson uses comic books with a wide range of writing activities: short story, informative, biography, and comic strip. You have lesson plans and instructions for how to use this. Use comics to teach biographics. Many teachers groan about teaching nonfiction. I love this.
Image via Wikipedia
So at first blush, the new homework help Web site Slader might be accused of fostering just this sort of cheating behavior. The site offers the answers to homework questions in most major high school level math textbooks, and depending on how much you use it, there’s a fee. Students can pay for answers. Answers to all the questions, not just the odd ones. And answers with explanations and “proofs.” But it’s not as straightforward a transaction as it looks.
Though the site was originally launched with answers written by math tutors and teachers, the plan going forward is to use the peer-to-peer model — students helping each other on the site. The most useful answers will be rated with stars to distinguish them.
Of course, students have long shared their answers the old fashioned way – turning to one another for help, sharing their answers and solutions — whether over the phone or face-to-face, whether transcribed word-for-word from another student’s paper or solved thanks to the help and support from a peer. And that will be the model used for Slader: homework answers for students written by students.
Whoa. I’d be very curious to hear what you all think about this.
No. Really. You can’t teach the unwilling.
Here are options in my speech class:
- Pick your topic, whatever you want as long as it fits the genre of speech (persuasive, narrative, etc.)
- Research it however you want, either with print or web
- Show me some progress points as you work
- Make whatever kind of visual aid you want
- Choose the day you want to give it
- I’m here for guidance all along the way
- Perform, critique, laugh, applaud
- Repeat the progress X 5 for a semester with various topics, techniques, and strategies
- No textbooks. No tests.
And I still, STILL, won’t have kids do any work. I have had successes in the past where I spend weeks begging, pleading, nagging, and suddenly a light flips on and the kid does something and we build from there.
But then there are some who truly, really, won’t do anything. And there parents won’t push them, or guide or support me. I’ve made the phone calls. I’ve sent the letters. I’ve done the heart to hearts and one to ones. And out of the estimated 1,500 kids I’ve taught, there are those who refuse to work. It’s a shrug of the shoulders. ”Who do you want to BE?” I ask, “What do you want to DO with yourself?” Shrug.
kimmykaten accused me of not understanding my students. I understand them. I understand their 50% poverty rate. I understand their teen pregnancies. I understand their family illnesses that override their education. I also understand their overbearing parents that put sports over books. I understand their high stakes honors classes and their drive to get into the Good School. I understand their parents that LET them not work. I understand the siblings that blazed a path of inadequacy the younger ones feel obligated to follow.
So when kimmykaten says, ‘A child saying “I dunno, nothing” should never be the cue for someone to give up on them, but that is clearly what this instructor with all of this “experience” has done.” She really doesn’t get it.
I’ll teach the willing. I leave all windows and doors to learning open. No one sleeps. No one plays with his phone. You sit there, child, and you think about “nothing” while the rest of us explore, debate, and ask each other questions. And when the idea sparks and he’s ready, I am there for him.
Forcing the content on a child is just as bad as completely neglecting her. I do neither.
Thank you so much for shedding light on one of my big fears. I’m reblogging this so I can look back at it when times get tough, because I’m not even teaching yet and I already get stuck in the, “How can I reach the unreachable?!” train of thinking sometimes. This is partially because that’s what I feel like they’re telling me I need to do, here at college.
And I understand that I CAN make a difference, but it’s nice to have it validated to me that, yes, there will just be some students who aren’t willing to learn. And that’s not going to be my fault.
Thank you, again.
~Aff~
These two were my favorites, because they’ve had the biggest impact on my style of presenting.
4. White space trumps information dumps.
Many presenters try to cram as much information and data into their presentation as the time permits. We’ve assumed that content covered means content learned. We’ve also assumed that if we cover more content, the listener learns more.
Wrong! The amount of learning directly aligns to the amount of thinking and reflection. We need to create more white space (time for the learner to think) and less pushing of content. The more the learner is allowed to reflect, the more they learn.
5. Images trump words.
We remember images. We forget words. Why? 50%-80% of our brain’s natural processing power is devoted to processing sight. That’s more than all of our other senses. We actually see with our brains, not our eyes. Likewise, when we hear a word, our brain translates it into an image.
I really loved reading this. I hate to quote so much of the article (please do click through), but I’m a big supporter of this idea.
Technology will also never replace the need to be literate. Students will always need to be able to read and write. And it’s essential that they are able to do both incredibly well.
How do we prepare our students for the critical literacy skills required in today’s world? Although there’s so much to say about this matter, there’s one key aspect of it that’s been close to my heart since I attended a National Writing Project workshop more than a dozen years ago:
To help our students become writers, we need to write side by side with them.
In our classrooms, as students are scratching away with their pencils brainstorming ideas, drafting on the computer, thumbing through a thesaurus, or reading a section of their essay aloud to a classmate, we need to be willing to do the same. We need to be willing to participate in writer’s workshop with the children we teach. This sends an invaluable message to the young writers in the room. It says this:
I struggle too. I get tongue-tied and run out of things to say. I repeat myself and I forget words that I know I’ve used in the past. I sometimes change my mind halfway through a page, or even two, and want to start over with a new topic. Writing isn’t always so easy!
Here was one of my favorites:
Curating
Simply narrating isn’t enough to instill students with the sense that what they think and how they think will affect them for the rest of their lives. They must curate their learning, organize their thoughts, and arrange it in ways that make sense to them. I imagine it is very much like John Cusack’s character “Rob” in the movie High Fidelity, in which after experiencing a particularly painful breakup, he completely re-arranges his massive vinyl collection according to biographical significance. The order in which he places his albums tells the story of his many loves and breakups over the years, and while we don’t necessarily need to get students to be constantly re-examining their love lives, we do need to instill in them a love for self examination and reflection.
Portfolios of student work, assembling “best of” folders of writing for conferences, and reading previous work in an effort to re-asses its value in the face of new understanding means that narration and previous experiences are revisited, and sorted in a way that makes the learning process easy to follow. Again, technology doesn’t have to be used in order to do this. Technology helps with typical blogging platforms automatically curating archives, categories, and tags in a way that makes it easier to sift through one’s previous experiences, but any way in which we can encourage students and teachers to curate their own lives will help bring a better sense of accomplishment and achievement after accomplishing new tasks.
I’d love to have more time / energy to write these types of things. Most of the Tumblr teachers I know are using facebook regularly, but I think a lot of us miss out on what an asset (in addition to Tumblr of course) that Twitter can be for educators. Here’s a good little guide to look into if you have the time.
Facebook and Twitter guides for educators.
Immersive video - how it works
Condition One is a new app that uses the iPad to deliver interactive, immersive video. Here, Benji Lanyado demonstrates how it works, and showcases the Guardian’s first commissioned immersive video, shot in Tokyo. To view it, download the iPad app from Condition One at conditionone.com
• The Guardian’s Tokyo beta experimentsImmersive video. A new term for new media. Here is an example.
Is it bad that the first thing I think of is the more difficult job for videographers? All the same — this looks pretty awesome. I can’t wait to see more of it.
~Aff~
