Culminations

Photo taken by Marissa Melin

"All endings are also beginnings, we just don't know at the time."  -Mitch Albom

I am a dweller.  I dwell on endings.  As a teacher I dwell on my closings and shudder thinking about the days I don't get there.  I like closure. I like endings.  I like to give my students that closure to each lesson.  At the end of the year, I put together an anthology for my students so that they have closure from the year.  They take away their own publication along with their memories and I hope a new found appreciation for literature and writing and technology.

I recently started a new endeavor, my journey back into grad school and I am coming up on the first ending of my semester.  As I reflect back on this semester, I am searching for closure.  I have struggled getting back into being a learner and not just a teacher.  I have read this semester, not my usual young adult literature, but professional literature about teaching and learning.  As I dive back into school, I have one profound thought: All teachers should go back to school.  It is important to rediscover what being a student is like.  I think it gives us the ability to empathize with our students and learn more about our profession.

I thought I'd end this semester and this chapter with some thoughts on what I have learned this semester.

1.  I have a lot to learn.
2.  Research is challenging, but important.
3.  Purdue Owl is my APA friend.
4.  I need to learn the power of the paraphrase.
5.  Even a tech savvy teacher like me can learn more about technology.
6.  Every picture I share should be given the correct attribution.
7.  Blogging can be fun, and tedious, and fun all at the same time.
8.  Students should be allowed to explore their own interests in my classroom.
9.  I probably should have created a Twitter account years ago.
10.  My passion is technology.

I think that last take away is the big one.  I was pursuing a degree in curriculum but changed midway to a focus in technology.  The classes I took this semester highlighted this passion for me and I cannot wait to share my passion with other teachers.

Rubrics, Checklists, Lists, Oh My!

I am a product of lists. I make to do lists, project lists, homework lists, lists of things to grade, lists of assignments I need to do for grad school, and (optimistically) lists of things I want my husband to get done. My life is conducted in between bell schedules and calendars. I even have budgeted out my life in an interactive excel spreadsheet. I exist between rules and schedules and budgets, all different types of lists.

 When I think about how this between-the-lines world parallels into my classroom, I immediately think of rubrics. I remember when I became a teacher and was first introduced into the beautiful world of rubrics. I immediately flashed back to my own educational experience and one anecdote stands out above the rest.

"Grading Exams" by Olga Caprotti
CC BY-NC 2.0 (Links to an external site.) license https://flic.kr/p/5DLXjR

 In the 9th grade, I remember distinctly having an English teacher that was difficult to work for. She had her favorites and her less-than favorites. My sarcastic, know-it-all-and-willing-to-tell-you attitude, put me firmly in the latter group. We wrote an essay for her class and she passed back all our papers. I had a nice big 83 scrawled at the top of mine. I flipped through the paper looking for the tell-tale red annotations and corrections. There was nothing. It was simply an 83. I remember the assignment had specific elements but I had no clue how much they were worth. I didn't know how I lost 17 points only that I lost them. My best friend got hers back with a 100 and the comment that she was, "practically perfect." At the time, I only saw the event as unfair. How was her paper better than mine? What did she do differently? I assumed the teacher just liked her more and realized pretty early on, this grading would be a trend for the rest of the year.

 When I became an educator, I looked back on this event even more critically. What were the criteria? How were they scored? How did this teacher make sure she was grading accurately? How could I have improved with NO feedback. This is the glory that is rubrics. They take the guessing and questions out of grading. They give students clear objectives to reach for, provide teachers with clear guidelines to help remove bias from the grading process, and ultimately give students specific feedback on which elements they need to improve.

 If you aren't using rubrics in your classroom, think about what your current students/future teachers will look back upon in the years to come. Do your grades magically come from thin air?

 If you have never used rubrics before Rubistar is a great easy to use site, I recently used iRubric which has an interesting click and score function, and I love using Goobric with Google Apps for Education!

A Model for Teachers?

Today I am looking for some feedback.  I am transitioning in my school to a digital leadership role and am trying to create resources that teachers can recreate in their classroom.  Instead of showing you what a student might create for a digital story telling assignment, I made a teacher model.  I think Nearpod still demonstrates a lot of the story telling elements (and I even added in some audio)!  I am looking for how I could improve this teacher model to help teachers see the capabilities in Nearpod and ultimately show them what a great Nearpod presentation looks like.  Thanks for the help fellow bloggers!

Curriculum Page

Check out my new curriculum page giving information, links, and even some video guides to some amazing technology!

What's Your Story?

When I tell people I teach middle school, I get one of a few stock responses. Sometimes people simply ask, "Why?" Or they tell me, "I could never do that." Sometimes they simply wish me well on this impossible journey.

What they don't understand is I have a secret weapon. I don't just teach middle schoolers, I teach middle schoolers language arts. Some could call this a handicap but they don't understand the power of stories. When students sit in math or history or science they don't get a chance to share their stories. In my room, though, we are story tellers. We share and connect as a class, and that my friends, is what makes my job wonderful.

Writing by jeffry james acres on Flickr
CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jjpacres/3293117576/

I recently came across a new way of telling stories and that is digital story telling.  I've been thinking of ways to make this work in my classroom.  I think it would be interesting to have students use Prezi as a story telling tool, or voice threads, or even just using narrated slides on PowerPoint or SlideShare.  What I'm struggling with now, is what type of assignment I could use this for.  Right now our standards have become very cumbersome and not oriented towards narrative writing.  I, like every other 8th grade language arts teacher, am drowning in FSA (text based essay writing).  Every spare moment I get, I spend on poetry and book clubs.

My students are just wrapping up their first book club in class, and one pretty easy way to use digital story telling would be for my student stop make digital book reviews.  I think I might offer this as a culminating activity opportunity.  Check out the amazing book review one student did on Insurgent by Veronica Roth (do not watch if you have seen Divergent!)

We are also beginning to work on spoken word poetry.  This type of poetry has a performance element and it might be interesting to have students work on reading their poems via voice thread.  Using pictures paired with audio to create their poetry story.

All of these are still in development stage and I would love to hear how YOU use digital story telling in your classroom or even personal life!

Nearpod and Kahoot: Interactive Tools for ALL Classrooms

Check out my Nearpod presentation below.  See how Nearpod can work as homework (by going through the Nearpod presentation yourself) and check out my video walk throughs for both Nearpod and Kahoot!

Trust me... you want to use these in your classroom!

Looking Back to Look Forward

I was inspired this week to take a look back at the history of computers.  If you've read my previous post about my technology autobiography, then you know technology has been a part of my world for as long as I can remember.  I thought I'd take this week to look back at some of this technology.

Yes, that's me.  Not many adults my age have pictures of them on computers at such a young age.  I was talking to my husband whose parents had a computer in the house but it was for "taxes" and he wasn't allowed to use it.  My parents had us using every computer in the house and I know this contributed to my tech savvy nature as an adult.

I talked with my dad a lot this week about the computers we had. The one in the pictures could have been our old Leading Edge PC, which came out the year I was born and we purchased in 1987.  It could have had at most 512kb of memory.  To put this in perspective, that is about the size of FIVE small pictures.  It may have been our Mac IIcx which had our first color screen.  When my father bought this computer which has a shocking 20mb hard drive, my grandfather exclaimed, how are you ever going to fill up all that space!  It is more likely that it is one of the later computers we had, maybe our PC 80386 or our Mac IIsi.  This cutting edge computer had 40mb on it's hard disc.  I have 200 times that space in my relatively out of date iPhone.  

My favorite computer we had was by far our Macintosh Portable.  

It was the precursor to today's laptops.  Weighing only 16 pounds, my dad described how excited he was to actually take this computer with him.

Now a days, I am constantly lamenting how out of date my resources are at school.  How slow the bandwidth is and the lack of technology in general.  It was refreshing to look back and see how far I have come and we have come with technology.  It has certainly been exciting literally growing up with computers and I cannot wait to see where technology takes us and education in the future.