Category Archives: Connected Learning

Making Rockets and More…

I spent yesterday at UC Davis at a conference we threw for ourselves to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the California Writing Project. The conference was an opportunity to teach each other strategies, structures, and approaches that we find successful at our local writing project sites across the state…and to learn together. And we did that…and more.

At lunchtime there was an informal “making” session led by the director of the Northern California Writing Project. Using transparency film (Finally! A practical use for the boxes of the stuff schools have sitting around since document cameras have replaced overhead projectors.), colored electrical tape, cardboard, and hot glue, we crafted rockets (using a piece of pvc pipe as a mold).

We would then test them by firing them from a bicycle pump, air powered launcher. (Directions on Instructable…here) You’ll notice we sealed the tops and taped around them in hopes they would soar…rather than explode.

When our rockets were ready, we headed outside with the launcher and our rockets to test our creations. We had to place our rocket on the launch pad and then pump with the bicycle pump to build pressure in the system. We aimed for between 50 and 60 pounds of pressure.

After pumping, we pressed a button to release the pressure into our rockets and… POW!!! They shot high into the air and then turned down to land in the grass.

I’m looking forward to offering my students more opportunities to build and test and tinker. They might be building and launching rockets some day soon.

And building these rockets in much like the work we do in the writing project. At the San Diego Area Writing Project we build programs to support teachers and students with writing and writing instruction. Then we test them out, paying close attention to how they “fly”–what design elements are working, where do we need to tweak our design? What can we do to help these programs and approaches meet the “mark” we are aiming for? And then we continue to tinker. How can we make this work better? What improvements are needed? Which teachers and students are we reaching? Who is missing?

I had a lot of fun building and testing rockets with my friends and colleagues yesterday. And I love building and testing programs for teachers and students. Writing itself is a lot like building a rocket. Writers need opportunities to compose and test, get some feedback, and then tinker (or start over) until it gets closer to the desired target. Sometimes it takes some tangible tinkering with rocket design to remind me of all the tinkering that happens in my life and in my classroom and in our writing project.

So, go out and tinker today… What rockets have you launched lately?

Listening: Becoming a Connected Educator

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Earlier in the week I posted about being a Connected Educator. Since then I’ve also been thinking about those educators who are connected but not yet putting their voices out in the digital space professionally. Lurker is the term I’ve heard to describe people who read on social media but don’t comment or post themselves. But lurker has such an evil sound to it–as though they lurk in order to gain information for underhanded reasons. In some ways they seem to me to be listeners, like those students in my classroom who are soaking everything up like sponges but can’t yet bear to raise their hand and make a public comment.

Like the students in my classroom, I suspect that those digital listeners will at some point begin to comment and post for themselves, they just aren’t ready…yet. And since I started this blog (almost three months ago), I have had many instances of people making comments about my content when I’ve had no evidence of their interaction. It feels a bit odd at first. Almost like someone is eavesdropping on a conversation that they are not participating in. But then again, I am making a choice to put my writing and thinking out in the public sphere. And whether people chose to comment or “like” my blog post is a decision for them to make. It also reminds me as a reader of blogs and other social media that I read substantially more than I comment or otherwise indicate my presence.

And I also know that sometimes it just takes the right condition to get someone to dip their toe into the social media waters. If you listen to the NWP radio show on being a Connected Educator you will hear Abby and Janis and Barb talk about getting started and how much it helps to have support, like when our SDAWP teachers take on the Twitter account as @SDAWP_Fellow for a week. (We adapted that idea from Sweden’s practice of having a citizen take on the country’s Twitter account.) It’s also like having Barb and Matt’s support when trying out blogging on our collaborative blog, SDAWP Voices.

Today for my #sdawpphotovoices photo-a-day I took a photo of what I thought was some kind of fungus making a silky white coating on the leaves of our hibiscus plant. When I posted it to Instagram and Twitter, I got a response from one of my colleagues from my school site via Twitter telling me that this “fungus” was in fact white flies. I knew my colleague had a Twitter account, but she seldom tweets. I do try to nudge my colleagues when I see something that I think will interest them by “mentioning” them on Twitter. (I know I’m more likely to respond when someone “elbows” me and points me to something that has been posted.) I did this on Friday with my colleague when I saw an app I thought she might find interesting. And she acknowledged that tweet by replying. And then today, without a nudge, she shared valuable information with me about my plant.

There are stages to being connected. Most people start slow (I know I did) and then work up to more active participation. For most of us that’s how we learn to do a lot of things. We watch, we listen, we test, we get some feedback and then continue to increase our confidence and participation–or abandon that thing altogether. As educators we can’t afford to abandon digital literacy or being connected educators, but it isn’t necessary to jump in the deep end. There are lots of support systems out there.

In what ways are you connected? What is the one thing you will do in the next week to increase your connectedness? Will you comment on a blog? Respond to a tweet? Tweet a link to an interesting article or blog post? Start a Twitter account? (You are welcome to follow me @kd0602) I’d love to know if you are willing to post your goal as a comment!

Make it Write: October’s Photo-a-Day Experimentation

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Maintaining an extended photo-a-day practice (mine has gone on for over a year now!) means figuring out how to keep it interesting and creative. I depend on my friends to help me think through new ideas and consider whether my ideas are feasible or not.

So Abby suggested making this month about writing since it is the month of the National Day on Writing. And I was thinking about what that would look like. I know I don’t want to have to take pictures of hands and pencils all month! But I love the idea of exploring all the ways we “write” our world. What inspires our writing? What impedes our writing? Where do we find people writing? Where do we find writing in the spaces we inhabit? Where is writing absent? What is the writing on the wall? (How will I incorporate macro photography with this prompt? Hmmm….)

So all month in our photos I invite you to consider writing in the broadest sense. Where will this open-ended experiment take you? Will you find it restrictive or inspiring? And as always, take some time each week to reflect on your photos, write a blog post or comment sharing those thoughts, select a favorite photo, or create a collage and share it on this post.

And here’s a photo to get you started:

This is Jack, one of my two cats. He’s wanting my undivided attention and definitely interfering with my writing as he snoozes on my computer! (He even managed to type a few letters with his body in the process of being in the way!)

Can’t wait to see all the ways that writing can be interpreted in a photo…

Be sure to post your photo each day to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr using the hashtag #sdawpphotovoices. (You can post anywhere—if you want others to be able to follow your photos, Instagram and Twitter are best!) For more information about posting click here. At the end of each week you’re also invited to curate your pictures from the week and select one to highlight. You might post it on your blog along with some musings about why you selected it. If you don’t have a blog of your own, you have a couple of choices—you can create a blog (be sure to share it with us by including your blog address in the comments here—or better yet, tweet it using the hashtag #sdawpphotovoices) or you can post to the SDAWP Voices blog.

As the month goes on, come back to this post to link up your curated photos! Click on the link up button below and add your favorites. Or post a comment with an image on this post!

Noticing Texture: September’s Photo-a-Day Invitation (thinkingthroughmylens.wordpress.com)

Saturated

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In our classroom we like to give students lots of ways to process information. They listen, they speak, they sketch, they observe, they write, they read, they move, they sing, they paint…

They are saturated with learning experiences. Today we painted. But it was just a part of a series of experiences to help students look closely, notice details, and then learn to sketch roundness by using curved lines and shading with their sketch pencils. They started with pumpkins harvested from our school garden. They moved to tomatoes, also harvested in the garden. They studied Vincent Van Gogh and learned about the concept of still life. They arranged their own still life composition and photographed it using their iPads. They used the photo as a guide for sketching their unique composition–and also learned some techniques for showing the overlapping of the fruits and vegetables. And then today they tried the same techniques using watercolor paints.

These six, seven, and eight year olds saturated their compositions with the brilliant colors of fall based on their experiences with the actual objects.

In this photo you can see the gorgeous sketch (that the student made earlier this week) that guided this careful painting. Saturating students in a variety of experiences related to a topic allows for deeper and more meaningful learning. This learning is not just about art–although the art is beautiful–it’s also science and history and math and reading and writing…and so much more.

And conveniently, this week’s Weekly Photo Challenge is saturated. It talks about color…but there is so much more to saturation than color, in my opinion!

How do you saturate yourself and your students in learning experiences?

Mentor Text: September Is…

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As a teacher of writing, I see mentor text everywhere. It exists in expected places–like well-written children’s literature and in less traditional places like Youtube videos, blog posts, and even billboards and advertisements. The tricky part about using mentor text to support writers is finding the right mentor text to use in the situation at hand. With that in mind, sharing our successes with mentor texts is a great way to help each other as we make our own classroom selections. The 113 Mentor Texts Challenge over at SDAWP Voices attempts to do just that–create a collection of mentor texts that educators from all levels and all over are using.

Early in the school year in addition to doing some sentence level work, we also like to use mentor text to support students’ generation of whole text. After examining a number of texts we had for consideration, we decided last week to go with a poem to support our young writers. Bobbi Katz wrote this poem called September Is that describes some qualities of the beginning of school that are easy for students to relate to.

September Is

September is

when yellow pencils

in brand new eraser hats

bravely wait on perfect points–

ready to march across miles of lines

in empty notebooks–

and

September is

when a piece of chalk

skates across the board–

swirling and looping–

until it spells your new teacher’s

name.

Bobbi Katz

As we studied this piece as a class, students noticed that the pencils were described like people…with hats and ready to march. (They do know that is called personification) They noticed the use of swirling and looping to further describe the skating of the chalk. They noticed that Bobbi Katz didn’t just make a list of things in school, she picked two and then went into more detail about each of them.

As students got ready to use September Is as a mentor text for their own writing, we also talked about other ideas besides September as a focus for the writing. They were thinking about Fall Is and School Is as other possibilities.

Students began to generate ideas on that first day and then set their writing aside. The following day we asked a couple of volunteers to share their work in progress as we noticed what they were doing well. Students definitely were including interesting verbs and expanded descriptions. We all then went back to work…even those who thought they were done…to consider stronger words, to add more description and detail.

And here are a couple of student-generated drafts.

“E” — a first grader — wrote this:

Fall Is

Fall is Halloween when ghosts glide through the night sky and when leaves glide off the trees.

“S” — a third grader –wrote this:

Fall Is

Fall is…

when the reddish-brown leaves are too tired of hanging hopelessly on the weak branches so they twirl and spin in the air before they carefully float right on to the cold grassy land full of new seedlings that are going to grow in the summer.

Fall is also when you scoop all of the white tear-shaped seeds out of the big round orange pumpkin and carve a face for the spooky night when ghosts haunt the night sky and children in costumes are running about trick-or-treating and scaring everybody.

I feel like my students captured fall in their writing and that Bobbi Katz supported their ideas. They were able to use her basic structure and let her strong words and images guide them to their own compelling compositions. That’s the power of mentor text!

Engagement, Learning, and Technology

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How do we, as teachers, use technology in ways that improve opportunities for student learning in our classrooms? Now in our second year with 1:1 iPads, this question is always on our minds. My teaching partner and I are always thinking about ways to increase student engagement and participation in all aspects of the classroom–in line with our beliefs that engagement and participation play an important role in learning. Sometimes those ideas involve our iPads–and somethings they don’t, we are always considering student learning rather than iPad use as the goal. Paula over at Amplifying Minds wrote earlier today about the role technology should or could play in enabling learning.

This week we experimented with using the app educreations as a tool during our morning calendar time to encourage more interaction and participation. My immediate observation is that more students can share their mathematical equation generation since the white board feature allows students and teachers to see many more attempts than were available orally. And the novelty factor is certainly at work–students are interested in using the iPad, so there is more immediate engagement. I do realize we could do a similar process using our actual handheld white boards and markers–messier, but similar.

I’m also seeing students use different aspects of the educreations app for their equation generation–the typing feature, the writing feature, a variety of colors… (And it’s way less messy than the markers!) I feel like this is just the tip of the iceberg of possibilities, and I suspect that students will show us more ways to use this tool.

And an added bonus was reported back to me…a guest teacher who worked for my teaching partner on Wednesday using this new tool in our classroom implemented this strategy in another classroom later this week. She was quite excited about the success and engagement the students experienced, and proud of her own ability to implement a new strategy with the students.

Sometimes it take a new tool, like the 1:1 iPads to push our thinking about ways to modify our own teaching strategies…to move out of comfort zones and try new ways of working with and engaging students. I don’t have any illusions that this particular strategy being a ground-breaking innovation in learning, but even small steps can improve the learning experience for students. We just have to keep moving forward…and be open to experimentation and listen to student ideas about innovation as well!

How are you supporting and enhancing student learning in your classroom?

A Question? A Story?

Building Rhythms

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As we enter the fourth week of school, I can feel the rhythm settling in. It’s not the dulling thrum of never-changing routine, but the strong heartbeat of a community in progress. You might think that because two thirds of our students remain the same each year, that the beginning of the year would be seamless. But in fact, we feel the transition even with so much remaining the same.

Each year students take on a new role in the classroom. Those veteran third graders, who have already spent two years in the classroom with us, are figuring out just how to be a classroom and school leader. They are considering how to provide support to their younger classmates while still maintaining their emerging “cool” image…not an easy balancing act! Second graders, who used to be those “little kids,” are wrestling with stepping up to the demands of the being in the middle–no longer needing as much support, and yet grappling with no longer being the youngest. And our brand new first graders have spent the last several weeks trying to figure out what it means to be a part of our multiage class. A place with a history–a legacy of shared learning that pops up regularly, and they feel left out of. They are learning to work with others, to accept help from their older peers, and to risk adding their contributions to our classroom learning.

This week feels like the turning point. We are feeling like a cohesive community learning together. Students are taking risks, supporting each other, and settling in…with the calm hum of learning-in-progress filling the room.

I can feel the rhythm building and soon the melody will come into focus. I look forward to our voices blending and harmonizing as we grow together.

I love these moments of teaching.

Birds on a Wire: Connections and Interconnections

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I often ask my students to make connections. Connections between books we read. Connections between things that happen at school and at home. Connections between our math lessons and our social studies lessons. And I find myself constantly making connections.

A couple of weeks ago our garden teacher introduced the word interconnected along with the word ecosystem. His emphasis was that the garden is an ecosystem where the plants and animals…all the living things are interconnected. When something happens to one, there is an impact on the others.

This morning in the New York Times Magazine I read an article about emotional intelligence and its impact on student learning and success. While the article debated methods of providing instruction in emotional intelligence, it had me thinking about the microcosm of the classroom and other communities of practice in my life. Our actions and attitudes impact those around us–whether we intend it or not.

When I arrived at the beach this afternoon for a short walk, I noticed a whole line of birds on a power wire. I felt compelled to capture this image with my camera–even knowing that my iPhone is not the best tool for capturing images at a distance. I walked as close as I could get and snapped the birds from a few different angles.

In some ways these birds remind me of the idea of interconnections. Some fly into an open space on the wire, others fly off. They are all sharing the same space, with the movement of one impacting all the birds in some way.

Like the birds on the wire, each student in the classroom has an impact on the others. We are both interconnected and interdependent. As a result, as teachers it is important to consider students’ emotional well-being and help them learn to handle conflict, stress, frustration, and disappointment. These skills are not in our Common Core Standards and are not tested on annual standardized testing measures. But they matter…to all of us.

I don’t have convincing data-based evidence that attention to students’ emotional needs will result in successful, well-adjusted adults–but I know it can’t hurt. Students who learn to build consensus in group work can carry that skill beyond the classroom. When conflicts can be resolved with words and compromise rather than fists and tears, we all benefit. Students who have strategies and tools to manage difficult situations will be better equipped to deal with the obstacles that life deals them.

In the garden, in my classroom…and on the wire, interconnectedness means our actions and decisions impact those around us. And in our increasingly connected global society, we are all birds on a wire.

What do you do to support your own emotional well-being? How do you help build the interpersonal skills of the young people in your life?

Thinking Through My Lens

Category Archives: Connected Learning

Making Rockets and More…

Make it Write: October’s Photo-a-Day Experimentation

Saturated

Mentor Text: September Is…

Engagement, Learning, and Technology

A Question? A Story?

Building Rhythms

Birds on a Wire: Connections and Interconnections

September Smooth

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