Creating Lifelong Learners

My blog has been having technical trouble since my web host has updated their software after being taken over by another company.

At first they wiped out my last few posts, then they wiped out my sidebar. I got tired of waiting and decided to take the problem into my own hands. I managed to get back the sidebar but now I wiped out all of my posts! Luckily I kept a backup.

It’s kind of liberating having nothing at all here, like a blank slate. Although I’m trying to avoid the slightly panicked feeling of having two years of work wiped out.

I hope to be able to reinstall everything soon. If not, please leave a comment letting me know if you have a web host you can recommend.

This is an example of a WordPress page, you could edit this to put information about yourself or your site so readers know where you are coming from. You can create as many pages like this one or sub-pages as you like and manage all of your content inside of WordPress.

Sorry for the short notice but if you have 30 minutes to spare today I’ll be a guest on Ed Tech Talk to promote the upcoming free K12 Online Conference 2009.

They will be showing a selection of some of the best previous K12 Conference presentations (but they’ve also included mine : ).  After the presentation, I’ll be there live to answer questions and talk about the project.

My preso is the first one up.  I’ll be there at 11:00 Pacific Time.  You go to http://www.edtechtalk.com to see it/hear it.  Here’s a link for more information.

Here are a few tools to use when assessing students at the beginning of the year:

The Basic Phonics Skills Test (BPST)
This is helpful in identifying specific areas of phonics need (short vowels, long vowels, digraphs, etc.)

San Diego Quick Assessment
It’s also important to know students’ knowledge of sight words which is an almost completely separate skill from decoding and an almost equal predictor of reading success.

Yopp-Singer
Test of phoneme segmentation

DIBELS
provides several free fluency passages as well as comprehension assessments

What pre-assessments do you use?

Independent Work Time, a time when students are working on their own while the teacher works with small groups.  It’s an official part of our reading curriculum but should really be a part of every teacher’s day in some form or other since it is one of the few times you can differentiate your teaching.  It also pays off in dividends if you’re able to teach your students to work independently.

I’ve answered some questions about Independent Work Time before:

IWT FAQ

What Do I Do During IWT?

Additional Articles on Independent Work Time

Here’s a new question about debriefing, those few minutes of wrapping up loose ends at the end of IWT:

Hi Mathew!
I am a 2nd grade teacher in AZ and I purchased your CD and have followed it for 3 weeks now. So far, it is working wonderfully for me. However, I haven’t been very faithful about the debriefing time after IWT is over mainly because when our IWT is done then it’s time to go out for recess and the kids (and myself) are in a hurry usually.  Should I continue to do the debriefing all year?  If you consider it important, I will try to do it more consistently.  I guess I need to allow a 5-10 min. time before recess to debrief the kids.  Also, we are mandated to have literacy centers that cover the “big 4″:  Comprehension, Phonics, Fluency, and Vocabulary. How would I work that in with the Must Dos and May Dos?  Thanks in advance.

I do feel that debriefing is important.  However, if behavior is not a problem, it would less important and in the real world there will be days you don’t get to it.

Invariably there will be small problems that come up and get bigger over time and if you don’t debrief, it’s difficult to address them.  Also, debriefing is the time when you can talk about the work itself and hold students accountable to having finished it.  For example, asking “Who found out something new in their research today?”  “Who revised their writing and how did you make it better?”  If you never debrief then students might get the message that there aren’t specific skills they’re working on.

In terms of your mandated centers, they can be either must dos or may dos.  Certainly there are more engaging ways and boring ways to address the same skills.  Your creativity will go a long way in planning those centers.  Good luck.  -Mathew

How about you, how is debriefing working in your classroom?

As you are getting ready to meet your new students, remember that getting to know them is more than just silly ice breakers and bingo games.  I’m not disparaging those activities, I’ve even posted several of them.  However, know that the process of getting to know your students doesn’t end when you’ve found out who’s visited a foreign country.

I’ve never believed that you have to like your students in order to teach them.  However, over the course of a year, I do try to find one thing I appreciate in each  of them.  Some things like charm, a sense of humor or an encyclopedic knowledge of dinosaurs show themselves on the first day of school.  However, other things like a penchant for organization, a photographic memory, or the ability to cleverly problem solve take time to reveal themselves.

Signs of personality in your students show themselves everywhere if you’re looking for them.  I notice which cartoon characters are on which student’s backpack or homework folder.  I notice how they relate to each other when they think I’m not listening.  I provide opportunities like music and drama, often integrated with the rest of our curriculum, to provide opportunities for students to show talents that don’t typically show up in a classroom.

So, if you think you’re going to get to know your students during the first day, first week, or even first month of school, remember it’s a marathon and not a sprint and keep yourself open to getting to know who they are all year.  Knowing who they are helps you know how to reach them.  And the ones who are hardest to reach need you the most.

Here are some resources I’ve compiled to assist you in planning for your return to school:

Need something to do?  Want to get to know your students?
Activities for the First Day of School

Want to beef up on classroom management?  Here’s everything you need from job charts to management systems:
Classroom Management for Teachers

For Open Court Reading teachers, I’d start with
Unit Openers
then Concept Question Boards
and finally have a plan for more explicitly teaching reading comprehension this year

In preparation for going to back to school, e-mail delivery of Creating Lifelong Learners resumes today.

I hope my readers have had a restful summer.  As a reminder, this is the official blog of Open Court Resources.com (not the publisher of Open Court Reading but a teacher created resource) as well as the personal expression of me, Mathew Needleman, teacher, filmmaker, and technology integration guru of sorts.

You are receiving this because you subscribed to it and will receive weekly updates as long as you continue to subscribe.

I will continue to write about teaching language arts as well as integrating technology into the curriculum.  I am entering a new job as a provider of intervention to at risk students.  I suspect that I will be writing about that in the months ahead as well as commenting on changes in educational policy taking place at the state and national levels.

Thanks for reading.

Article on differences between Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express.

Complete keyboard shortcuts.

Also see iMovie Bootcamp Links for recommended links and inspiration.

Articles

Better Color Correction in Final Cut Express

Videos

Using Chroma Key in FCX (Green Screen)

The Shining

Scary Mary

Youtube Downloaders

PWN Youtube (easiest)
Insert the letters PWN before youtube in your web browser address and select download.

Zamzar.com
Instructions are here.

Copyrights and Fair Use

Royalty Free Images/Sounds/Movies

The Fair Use Doctrine
(here’s what’s allowed)

Public Domain Slider
(how to determine what’s in the public domain)

Barely Legal Radio Podcast
(entertainment law talk show)

Bonus Tips

Google Alerts (set this up to be notified when your name (or any subject worth following) appears on a page)

Here are the links for my latest iMovie workshop at the Los Angeles County Office of Education.  These page will likely be updated at the end of day two of the workshop.

In this workshop participants learn the basic and advanced features of iMovie ‘09 and create their own commercials, public service announcements or one minute narratives.

iMovie Help

Apple Movie Tutorials
(free movies for reminders of simple tasks)

iMovie ‘09 Handout
(a fantastic printable handout by Luis Perez)

Copyrights and Fair Use

Royalty Free Images/Sounds/Movies

The Fair Use Doctrine
(here’s what’s allowed)

Public Domain Slider
(how to determine what’s in the public domain)

Barely Legal Radio Podcast
(entertainment law talk show)

Movies Shown in Class

Mathew’s K12 Online Conference Presentation

High School Musical 2 Trailer Demonstrating Rule of Thirds

Cooties Public Service Announcement Parody

Christopher Knight for School Board

Alec Couros Grad School Trailer

Cyberbullying Talent Show

Software Mentioned

HandBrake
(for getting movies off of DVDs)

Mouse Locator
(free program for making your mouse visible for presentations)

3-2-1 Visual Timer Widget

Facts About Bullying

Bullying Facts and Resources

Update:  Youtube Downloaders

PWN Youtube (easiest)
Insert the letters PWN before youtube in your web browser address and select download.

Zamzar.com
Instructions are here.

Updated: Handouts from workshop and updated links.

Handouts

Keynote 09 Handout

Extended Keynote Handout

Pages 09 Handout

Extended Pages Handout

Extended Pages Handout #2

Technical Resources

iWork Tutorials
free movies you can watch on Apple’s web site which show you step by step how to complete tasks in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers

Keynote Remote App for iPhone

Design Resources

Newsletter First Aid

Make Captivating Graphs and Charts

Before and After Slides from Garr Reynolds

Royalty Free Images

Pics4Learning

MorgueFile.com

Flickr.com/Creative Commons

More Royalty Free Image Sites

School Purchase Info

iWork School Site License
for only $250 you can purchase a license for up to 500 computers at a school site

Bonus (Presenter Tools)

Mouse Locator
Software to make your mouse easier to view on-screen when doing software demonstrations

iPhone Keynote Remote App

I had a conversation with a friend about the possiblity of the L.A. Times eliminating their printed editions and becoming an exclusively online newspaper.

I visit the L.A. Times web site every day but I still find that there are articles in the printed edition that I somehow miss online. I also find that reading on the computer is difficult for my eyes and I tend to skim more than I do when reading the physical edition. If given a choice between reading the printed edition or reading online, I would choose to read the actual newspaper.

However, here’s what the L.A. Times (and other papers) could do to improve the online experience of reading and I would be willing to pay for it.

1. Allow more customization.
I’d like to be able to have their web site show me sections of the newspaper that are of most interest to me. When baseball season is over, I don’t really read the sports section. I always read the business section and I like to read it first. Please let me arrange the web site like I can arrange my own newspaper.

2. I’m more interested in some stories than others. Similar to the way Netflix lets me find movies I’d like based on my ratings, can you intuitively figure out which articles are of most interest to me and show me those first?

3. Don’t put everything on the front page and make it easier to find other articles if I click away from your front page.

4. Show more videos. They’re interesting. The pairing between TV News and printed information is perhaps the most informative and and most user friendly format possible in this multimedia age.

Do you have any ideas?

Here’s a list of my favorite Mac applications that do not come with the Mac. Many of them are freeware or shareware.

Firefox
This one is maybe too obvious to include. However, this open source browser is a must for any Mac user. Many people are shocked when I tell them I much prefer Safari. However, you do Firefox for those times when Safari doesn’t work quite right.

Mouseposé
Mouseposé puts a spotlight around your mouse’s cursor and (if you wish) can display the keystrokes you’re pushing as well. This is incredibly useful when doing software demonstrations as it allows audiences to easily follow your cursor and know what you’re doing. It can also be useful for the visually impaired to find their cursor more easily.

Update: If you don’t need the computer to display your keystrokes, then here’s a free option, Mouse Locator:

WireTap Pro
This program allows you to grab and record software from any application or your entire system. I use this for time shifting streaming audio and video, converting DVD footage into audio tracks.

HandBrake
Whenever I want to add DVD footage onto my iPod this is my tool of choice.

TweetDeck
For Twitter users, TweetDeck has made me a born-again Twitter user. I had lost interest in Twitter until I discovered TweetDeck. It allows me to create groups of those I’m following so that I am sure not to miss the few people/organizations I’m most interested in following. By separating out a few tweets, it also makes it easier to follow the larger group. I love this program.

Doug’s AppleScripts
These are not applications but scripts that increase the functionality of iTunes. There are scripts to copy files off of your iPod, automatically play preview of songs in the iTunes store, corral dead audio tracks, corral one-hit wonders, convert video types and hundreds of other things. These are all free, donations accepted.

DataGuardian
I’m not sure if this is the best of its kind but everyone needs a program to keep track of multiple passwords. This is the one I use to store passwords and serial numbers so I never lose them.

Skitch
From the makers of ComicLife (another favorite app) this program/service allows you to take screen captures and instantly share them on the web. You don’t know that you need this until you use it. Now it’s indispensable to me. All bloggers should have this. It takes a 5 step process and makes it a 2 step process.

For laptops

Hotspot Shield is free and creates a Virtual Private Network when you are browsing public Wi-Fi networks.  In English, this encrypts your transmissions so that you won’t be hacked when you’re on a wireless network used by other people.  Since it’s free, this app displays ads when you use it but you can easily turn it off when you don’t need it.  I think it’s absolutely worth it.

And some intriguing apps I haven’t used  yet:

1Password
Perhaps better password management than my recommendation but also more expensive. It not only remembers and generates passwords, it automatically fills them in.

iAnti-Virus
Free program to identify spyware and malware on your Mac.  I haven’t found any yet.

NetNewsWire
Free RSS reader that syncs between machines.

For more great applications, see this month’s Macworld cover story “56 Must Have Apps” (not available online).

What are your favorite app add-ons?

The comments to the iSchool video I posted give some insight into some of the challenges involved in implementing one to one technology of any kind:

Chelsea asks, “Won’t students tune out if we use iPod Touches in the classroom?”

I say…The distraction argument has been made in terms of integrating multimedia in the curriculum, using the internet, math manipulatives, realia, etc. It seems that making school a boring place has the biggest danger of tune out possible. How many students tune out listening to their teacher lecture all day?

What you’re describing, I think, is a classroom management issue. When I pass out linking cubes for teaching addition there’s the same tune-out danger. I always give students time to play with the cubes before starting the lesson. But once the lesson starts, if you’re messing around then I take the linking cubes. Same with the iPod Touches, netbooks, laptops, whatever you’re using.

Wrapping up this music themed mini-week on Creating Lifelong Learners, here are three music related podcasts I subscribe to:

Sound Opinions
from National Public Radio (home of This American Life) comes what they call the world’s only rock ‘n’ roll talk show. Based in Chicago, they’re the Siskel and Ebert of pop music. My favorite shows have included classical album dissections and analysis of particular genres like funk and disco. They also have interviews with established artists and have all their old shows available from their web site. The elevate the discussion of rock ‘n’ roll to serious criticism. I’ve discovered lots of new music from the podcast.

Morning Becomes Eclectic
I’ve also discovered new music from this podcast which features live performances by artists you’ve heard of and some you haven’t.

KEXP Song of the Day
This podcast gives you a free song every day. Most of the songs I don’t like but every four songs or so you find a winner. Looking at the past episodes, I find many songs I already own. This is also a good way to discover new music.

Bonus

If you become a fan of iTunes on Facebook you get occasional free tunes in addition to the free weekly selections on iTunes. You’ll have to endure Facebook advertising from iTunes in exchange.

Barely Legal Radio
I talk about this one all the time. If you’re interested in the legal side of the music business or are in a band that’s starting out, this show is for you. It’s hosted by entertainment attorney and member of the Vandals, Joe Escalante.

Any favorites to add?

Michael and Branding

How Michael Became a Brand Icon
What we should do to brand ourselves, our schools, our businesses

Death by an Overdose of Showbusiness
What we should not to to ourselves, our schools, our businesses

Humanizing Michael

Robert Hilburn Remembers
Long time L.A. Times critic reflects

Quincy Jones Remembers
After “Bad” the rest was just noise, Jones says of Michael’s life and surrounding controversy.

Teaching About Michael

As always, Larry Ferlazzo is there with resources for teaching.

Like many people, the iPod has drastically changed my music listening habits.  When I got my first iPod (five years ago and free via freeipods.com) my mission was to make it so that hitting shuffle would never bring up a bad tune.  Finally, I was able to extract just the songs I liked from albums that were overall made of crap.

So it’s rare that I buy albums even though I spend hundreds of dollars a year on music between iTunes and the Amazon music stores.  Nevertheless, a few albums get through.  Last year I was excited about Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” and Beck’s “Modern Guilt.”  I think “In Rainbows” is a masterpiece but a year later I have to be in a bad mood to listen to it with the exception of the opening track which helps me when I’m working out.  I tell my fiancé that Radiohead was the music I listened to when I was single and sad all the time.  Beck’s album, while poorly reviewed, was one of his most consistent albums in years.  I agree that there’s something empty about it but several of the songs are pleasantly surprising when they pop up on shuffle play today.

This year, I was excited about the new Wilco album which is released today but has been available via the band’s web site for months.  I’ve been a fan of Wilco since a friend of mine had me score a scene in her travel documentary with “California Stars.”  Years afterward I found “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” in a local music store (remember when we had those?) and I still consider one of my favorite albums of all time.

“Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” led me to explore Wilco’s entire back catalog and even side projects like Tweedy’s work with the Minus 5 and Loose Fur and his previous work with Uncle Tupelo.  Tweedy is an incredible songwriter and his body of work is remarkably consistent, his voice is one of my favorites because it’s appealing and yet not that intimidating.  I feel like I can sing along when I’m listening.

I was a bit disappointed by “A Ghost Is Born” I thought that they took the experimentation of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” too far.  There are some great songs on there but many of them descend into noise…too much noise.  While one can skip over the noise at the end of “Reservations” at the end of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot,” putting noise in the middle of the album makes it hard to get through it.  But the heartache of songs like “Wishful Thinking” and the killer bridge of “Theologians” bring me back to this album a track at a time when putting together playlists.

“Sky Blue Sky” got rid of the noise but also got rid of the rock.  To say the album is mellow is putting it lightly.  Some of the songs like “Impossible Germany” and “Side with the Seeds” have a nice payoff eventually but you have to stay awake to get to those points.

The newest album “Wilco (The Album)” finds  a perfect balance between the too much noise on “A Ghost Is Born” and the too much mellow on “Sky Blue Sky.”  The guitar solos that dominated “Sky Blue Sky” are used just enough to avoid stealing the show.  The songwriting, as always, is top notch and as an album it’s distinctly listenable.  Highlights for me include “Wilco (The Song)”, “You Never Know”, “I’ll Fight”, and “Country Disappeared.”

The album does not approach the perhaps impossible heights of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” but it’s a terrific mix of melody mixed with just enough darkness and depth to make this a great album that doesn’t make you feel depressed to listen to it.

I am suspending e-mail delivery of the blog for the summer.  As always, you can visit the blog directly by going to:

http://www.creatinglifelonglearners.com

E-mail delivery will resume in the fall.

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, please join me this summer for one of two movie making classes I’m teaching using iMovie ‘09 and Final Cut Express. Both classes are two day “boot camps” that are both about learning to use the particular software programs AND learning some basic concepts of filmmaking such as shot selection and editing tips.

iMovie ‘09 bootcamp is July 20-21st and Final Cut Express is July 23-24.

As a bonus, learn Pages and Keynote from iWork ‘09 on July 14th.

All classes are sponsored by the Los Angeles County Office of Education. There is a small fee to subsidize the cost of the classes.

Sign up for these classes at: http://ito.lacoe.edu/workshops/workshops_display.pl

As usual, I’ll post any links and handouts to the blog so attendees and non-attendees can view them here.

Here are some terrific finds for the end of the school year.

1. A fabulous listing of fake web sites, hoax photos, etc. The best being a site warning of the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide (also known as water).

2. Snag Films
Can’t remember where I found this but you can watch documentaries on this site for free. I particularly recommend Run Granny Run which was a really touching film about an 80+ year old woman who runs for senate. Very inspiring.

3. Alec Couros’s list of 80 great Youtube movies for teaching media literacy just got a little longer.

4. And create your own video sharing site for free using Fliggo which I’ve posted about before.

Here’s a great film that makes the case for using the iPod Touch in the classroom.  Hat tip to Cheryl Lee.

Kevin Hodgson lays out what he considers to be an ideal language arts curriculum.  Please read the entire post.  However, the tenets he puts forth are:

Writing to Learn

Including listening and speaking (as well as reading and writing)

A “Stakes Approach” (Moving from low-stakes like journal writing to high stakes like publishing and performance)

Writing Across the Curriculum

And including technology and multi-media

Scott McLeod suggests that we might be the problem with education.  Blaming the problem of low-level “kill and drill” education on the test is no excuse:

Our prevalent instructional model that emphasizes low-level, decontextualized, factual recall was dominant long before ‘the tests.’ Our challenges of providing higher-order thinking experiences, opportunities for authentic collaboration, and real-world connectedness existed long before the No Child Left Behind Act.

I don’t think Scott means to suggest that there aren’t problems with The Test.  However, he does ask us to take a look at ourselves and not use the test as an excuse to absolve us of a responsiblility to provide high quality education to our students.

I experience the same kind of excuses in regards to the Open Court Reading Program.  Whether or not we like the reading program, having it in our classes does not allow us to turn off that part of our responsiblity that requires an engaging curriculum and provides opportunity for higher level thinking and twenty-first century skills.

Disclaimer:  I am not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV.  My thinking has been shaped by a number of sources, mostly notably the Barely Legal Radio Podcast.

Our Rights

Fair Use allows us to use portions of copyrighted work for educational purposes in our classrooms.  I’m of the belief that you can interpret copyright laws extremely liberally if the work you’re creating starts and ends within your classroom walls and is for academic purposes.  The problem is very little of the good work starts and ends within your classroom walls.  As soon as you put your work on the internet you’re creating copies of copyrighted work and redistributing.  As soon as you invite an audience you may be causing a public performance.

Myth #1:  It’s Not A Copyright Infringement If We Don’t Charge For It?

Scenario:  A school wants to put on an established play (e.g. Annie) and not pay royalties.

Facts (as I see them):  Many schools believe that if they put on a performance for free or solicit donations instead of charging a fee that obsolves them of any copyright responsibility.  Unfortunately, this is not so.

Playwrights and play publishers make money through royalties including royalties paid by schools and educational institutions.  It would be okay to do a scene from Annie as part of an acting class (there’s no audience and you’re using it for academic purposes) but to put on the musical and perform it for an audience requires a fee to be paid to the publisher.

Not charging a fee reduces the amount of damages to the publishing company but there are statutory damages (damages designed to punish you for breaking the law) that have to paid if you are caught.

Publishing companies do take into account the amount of money you are making from the performance of the show when they calculate royalty payments.  A free show costs less in terms of royalties than a paid show.

Myth #2:  I Can Use 30 Seconds and Its Not Breaking the Law

Scenario:  A teacher wants to use 30 seconds of copyrighted music in a podcast and believes that it’s okay to use just 30 seconds freely.

Facts (as I see them):  The 30 second rule is bunk.

Can you imagine a judge counting to thirty to determine whether a particular use of music violates the law?  Just 5 seconds of Stevie Wonder’s Superstition might be too much where 30 seconds of some other song may not even make a dent.  It’s about how and why you’re using the music that makes a difference.

Generally using copyrighted music as a soundtrack to a movie is illegal without permission.  The only way you can legally use the music if you are somehow making a comment on the song.  Its far better to use royalty free music in your podcast projects.

Please leave your comments and questions.

Update:  Links

Fair Use Is Your Friend

Fair Use and Education

How do you decide who to befriend on a social network?  I was planning on writing this even before my mother befriended me on Facebook.

This is not a how-to guide for students using social networks.  This is about how I use them as a teacher.  I preface this by saying that there are no rules.  And if there were rules then those rules are changing as we go.  My idea of how to use the different networks has certainly changed from a year ago.  A year from now I might say something completely different.

Facebook

This is the one network where my personal business is all hanging out.  There’s nothing inappropriate on there but because I share pictures of my new kitchen and my Hawaiian vacation, I only befriend people I know…usually these are people I’ve met in person but occasionally they are people with whom I’ve developed an online blogging relationship or correspondence.  Sometimes web site visitors who I’ve never talked to before try to befriend me and I don’t accept.  Sorry, pick another network and we can be colleagues.

Anyone who joins should read this article on setting up the privacy settings on Facebook. I block my page from Google and I don’t allow all my friends to see tagged photos of me so that I have control over what photos of me people see.  Invariably you will only be tagged when you’re having a bad hair day or a big zit.

But because it is possible to block as much as you want to about yourself from people you don’t want to see it, I don’t think you have to be afraid of joining.  I do draw the line when it comes to befriending students.  My first year’s class is not quite starting high school yet so the issue has never come up for me.  However, I always wonder if a student posted something about contemplating suicide or experiencing child abuse on their Facebook account if you would be mandated to report it or liable if you didn’t report even if you might have missed it in the first place.  I just think it’s inappropriate to befriend students.  Feel free to disagree.

Twitter

Thanks Oprah and CNN for bringing this to the masses.  Twitter is like the status function of Facebook and just that.  What’s cool about is that you can have conversations with people you’d never talk to in real life and you can get up to date news.

Anyone can follow me on Twitter.  At first I would follow back anyone who was also a teacher but it got so cumbersome to follow everyone that I started missing tweets from the people I really don’t want to not miss.  I use Tweetdeck on the Mac now and that helps to separate the people I follow into groups and it has a super great desktop interface.

Here are 7 Ways to Be Worth Following on Twitter and How to Make Any Tweet Worth Following
both of which I found via @angelamaiers who I want to be when I grow up.

LinkedIn

I’ll add anyone to my network on there if know them even just a little bit.  Tell me you use my web site and we’re colleagues.  That’s all it takes.  This is a business oriented Facebook minus the pictures.  You basically post your resume and recommend other people.  The day that a Fortune 500 company comes looking for a second grade teacher and UCLA graduate to be CEO I know I’ll be snatched up.

Ning

Ning is like a Facebook for teachers.  I used to add anyone to my colleagues list by lately Ning is subject to random spam attacks by nefarious and less than nefarious types.  I don’t like being spammed by friends or porn stars so I’ve become more selective about adding people as colleagues.  I add people I meet at conferences so that I remember them and can find them later.  It’s not supposed to be a mailing list manager but some people use it that way.

If you only join one Ning then join Classroom 2.0.  The whole idea is that you join Nings based on your interests but what happens is you end up a member of 20 nings and it makes you wish you only had joined one in the first place.  Stick with Classroom 2.0.  I haven’t stopped by there in ages but it helped me immensely in setting up technology projects and finding like minded individuals.

These are my thoughts about who to befriend.  Agree?  Disagree?  Have different ways of using the networks?  I did befriend my mom.  I think

Video in the Classroom Carnival #4 comes a month early.  There were just too many good tips and examples to hold off another month.

Video Production Examples from the Trenches

Mr. Moses’s middle schoolers’ productions.  I particularly enjoyed The Clumsy Ninja for its dry sense of humor and well thought out shot selection.

Los Angeles County Digital Voice Award Winners

6th Grade Puppet Shows from Kevin Hodgson’s class.

Kelly Dumont’s elementary film festival winners.

Professional Examples

Alec Couros posts a list of tons of great Youtube videos for teaching technology and media literacy including my own, Mr. Winkle Wakes.

Theory

The Substance of Style. A series of film essays on the influences of Wes Anderson.  Watch these to help train your eye on what to look for in teaching and evaluating film.

Literacy Status:  Its Complicated, Tom Woodward asks us to think about how we’re teaching literacy.  Have we redefined it?  Have we let tools take over technique?

Let the Beat Build.  Dan Meyer explains why this music video rocks.

Tutorials

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About iMovie ‘09 (But Were Afraid to Ask) from Yours Truly.

The Best Cinematic Tutorials Online from Smashing Magazine.

Normalizing Audio in Final Cut Pro by Larry Jordan (also check out his free FCP newsletter)

Lesson Plans

Case Study:  Video Production in Elementary

So Long Teachertube

I’ve been a loyal user of Teachertube for the last 2+ years.  I’ve been hosting the movies from Video in the Classroom on their site.

Unfortunately, I have received several complaints over the past year about the movies not playing all the way through and/or not playing at all.  The first time I got a complaint I thought that the problem was with my web site visitor’s computer.  However, I logged into Teachertube after not logging in for some time and was really disappointed to find changes to the site.  I can’t explain it exactly but the view is just extremely cluttered and it even appeared at first as though I had no videos on the site when in fact I have about ten. There are too many ads on the page and using the search function launches a google web search instead of a screen with the site’s movies.  It’s difficult to find what you’re looking for.  While I recognize and appreciate the site’s need for revenue, these changes make the site unbearable and not very user friendly.

I’m disappointed that Teachertube is not working out because I believe that there should be a central place for teachers to upload educational videos and because Teachertube is not blocked by many school districts.  However, I’ve given them enough time to get their act together and they haven’t. I’ve even had trouble viewing other people’s movies.

Hello Vimeo

For this reason I’ve uploaded my movies to Vimeo which I’ve seen used by some of my fellow bloggers with few problems.  It takes a few seconds for the movie to start but once it does, the movies play all the way through.  I also appreciate that the advertising is kept to a minimum.

Please check out my movies on Vimeo.  If Vimeo is blocked for you then you can still see the movies on Teachertube but be forewarned that the movies likely will not play al the way through without stopping.

Have you had a similar experience?  Where do you upload your movies?

It’s that time of year again for Open House in my district.

I’ve always taught at schools where parent engagement is a “problem.”  Getting parents to come to school is often difficult and it’s not unusual for some classrooms to have only one or two parents.  Here are my tips for the night.

Do

• Make ‘em laugh.
You don’t have to use humor but I do like to keep parents entertained.  Even if you feel that it’s not your job to make classroom engaging for students, understand that parents have a choice of whether to show up or not and if they’re not showing up then one of the reasons is probably that your classroom isn’t that interesting.  Since I started using Open House as a night to premiere our latest classroom films I’ve started having a full house.  A secondary goal is to downplay the institutional atmosphere of the school that is intimidating for parents who come from other countries and/or have been out of school for many years.  I am intimidated when I visit my old high school so I understand this.

• Give Your Students Some Ownership of the Room
Even in first and second grade I’ve started having students put their own work up on the wall.  I know this is unthinkable to many teachers.  However, I noticed that when I put students work up myself students have a hard time finding their work.  I still add the headlines and standards to the bulletin board but students learn to hang their own work on the wall.  This adds to students’ feelings of ownership of the room and as they get good at hanging papers straight they learn life skills and fine motor skills that they’re not getting reading and writing all day.  It takes very little time and it results in the bulletin boards being changed more frequently.

• Train Your Students to Lead Tours
Many of my students’ parents don’t speak English and they’re not that interested in checking out the work that we have posted around the room.  If they can’t read it then understandably checking out my students’ writing is boring and even an embarassing experience.  Ideally students can read their work to their parents but they can’t do this without being trained on how to give a tour.  I teach this to students ahead of time.

Don’t

• Discuss Students Individually
I always have a slideshow playing (using iPhoto and my laptop hooked up to the computer) as parents come in the room.  This makes it less awkward as parents enter and are standing around waiting for you to start.  This gives parents something to do right away and helps to diffuse questions about students.  If parents do want to know about their children, I have a conference sign up sheet available so that they can come back.

• Lecture
If parents get a lecture they will not be back.  You can work in teaching tips as you go through the night but lecturing parents, particularly English Language Learners who can’t understand you, will not get you far.

• Assume that Parents Who Don’t Who Up Don’t Care
Parents have many reasons for not coming to Open House.  They’re working, they’re busy, they’re intimidated.  Don’t assume that the parents who don’t make it to school don’t care about their students.

What are your tips?

Here are handouts and resources for the iMovie ‘09 class at LACOE.  This post is a work in progess.  I will add additional resources as I find them.

Technical Resources

12 Page Handout (iMovie Basics by Luis Perez)

Apple Free Tutorials (Short How To Movies) for iMovie ‘09

Additional Apple Free Tutorials

How to Export iMovies to Final Cut (Flickschool)

Artistic Resources

Film School for Video Podcasters

Curriculum Resources

Handout 9 Classroom Project Ideas by Mathew Needleman

Royalty Free Resources

Royalty Free Sound and Images

Royalty Free Movies

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Katie Morrow and Craig Nansen for helping me find resources.

When teaching writing it’s important to show students how to do it and show them good examples of that genre of writing.

Our fifth graders recently had to write a multi-paragraph essay on whether or not to support the Revolutionary War from the point of view of the colonists.

To write this prompt well one needs:

• content knowlege of the American Revolution
• knowledge of the genre of persuasion
• writing vocabulary (e.g. drafting, revising, and conventions)

As this writing comes at the culmination of a unit on the revolution, the content knowledge can be built through the story selections.  However, even if students learn everything you want them to about the War and its causes, they will not learn how to write persuasively by osmosis.

Rather than focus on everything at once, we chose to focus on teaching students to write persuasively.

Here’s a list of examples of persuasive writing to examine with students (found via Twitter):

• Ahlberg, Janet, and Allan Ahlberg. 1999. The Jolly Pocket Postman
• Caseley, Judith. Dear Annie
• Cronin, Doreen. Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type
• James, Simon. Dear Mr. Blueberry
• Orloff, Karen Kaufman. I Wanna Iguana
• Pak, Soyung. Dear Juno
• Rylant, Cynthia. Gooseberry Park
• Stewart, Sarah. The Gardener

Update:  Here are a few others…I Wanna Iguana, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus, The Great Kapok Tree, My Brother Dave Is Delicious.

Background

L.A. Youth is a teen newspaper that goes out for free to all the high schools and middle schools in the Los Angeles area.  It was founded to counteract censorship in high school newspapers and includes articles from teens all across L.A. including students in foster care and others who find a positive outlet for their creativity by writing for the paper.  With a circulation of approximately 500,000, it is the largest newspaper by and for teens.

It’s Personal

When I was in the ninth grade (17 years ago) I went to a free three day workshop at L.A. Youth to train you to write for their newspaper.  I got to visit the L.A. Times and experience what it was like to be a reporter.

I remember scoring an interview with a retired teacher who had been involved in the creation of an innovative high school newspaper that had been censored by the administration at the school and become the subject of lawsuits.  It was quite a coup when I called the school and they just gave me the retired guy’s home phone number.  It was a rare rainy night in L.A. when I my mom dropped me off to meet this old hippie at Canter’s Deli on Fairfax and record his thoughts on what had happened many years prior.  If you remember Hal Holbrook standing in shadows as Deep Throat in All the President’s Men, this guy looked just like that.  I remember that he bought me my hot chocolate, that I was really nervous and soaking wet.

Even though that was just a practice article that never got published, I remember that experience vividly, fondly, and with a sense of adventure.

I went on to write two articles for the newspaper…one about how I was annoying my family by turning off lights and shutting off the water while they were washing their hands in the name of being an environmentalist called “I Was A Teenage Mutant Earth Nut” (long before An Inconvenient Truth) and another about how to apply for financial aid.  The first article got picked up for their ten year retrospective and was reprinted in a book that L.A. Youth published of some of their interesting articles from the first ten years of the paper.

My article was mildly amusing (at least I think so) but other articles dealt with serious issues like teen sexuality, violence, coming to grips with your own culture, and the general malaise that goes along with being a teenager.  From the letters written to the paper you can tell that it’s made a difference in the lives of both readers and newspaper writers.

My time with the teen newspaper was brief but important in my personal and professional development.  I went on to become the editor of my high school yearbook and then revived our high school newspaper from the dead.  I wouldn’t have had the courage without L.A. Youth.  But my favorite moment of involvement with L.A. Youth came over a decade after I had left when a current student at my former high school was told to contact me to ask for my advice on how I had made our high school paper more relevant.  The girl had heard about me from one of the adult editors at L.A. Youth.

I forwarded the teen copies of the school paper I had created which included articles on the most reliable condoms to use and marijuana use (subjects I knew nothing about but figured were of interest to the rest of the student body) and pictures of Beavis and Butthead debating our school mascot.  I had become the Canter’s Deli hippie.

And now I write this blog.

My friend who drew the picture of me as an earth nut for the newspaper went on to design movie posters.  Working at the paper was a memorable and important part of my growth and development.  I can’t say it changed my life but I can say that my involvement was one of those experiences that played an important part in shaping who I am today.

Now the bad news

Surprise!  Newspapers are in trouble.  L.A. Youth which has been heavily subsidized by the L.A. Times for the past twenty years is being cut off by the larger paper and needs help to continue.  This part of the story has been written about more thoroughly in the LA Observed blog.

While all newspapers are figuring out how to keep themselves relevant and stay alive, L.A. Youth in particular needs support.  I was thinking that the paper could perhaps transition from a print copy to a blog but that would put the many disadvantage teenagers who read the paper and the majority of Americans who still don’t know what a blog is at a disadvantage.  That day isn’t here yet and it’s important that the print copy stays alive. L.A. Youth reaches out to those teens who need help and it gets teens those teens in the habit of reading the newspaper.

I’m going to make a small donation.  If you are able, please do the same and feel free to pass this along on your own blog.

For teachers of the Open Court Reading Program, OpenCourtResources.com now has its own page on Facebook.  Please show your support by becoming a fan.  Click on “Become a Fan.”  It’s very cool to see and hear from web site visitors and if there are any special events going on with the site I may post an update to the page.

Click here to visit Facebook page (visit from home because it’s probably blocked in your school district).

Every year or so I run a post about what this blog is about. Here’s one from around this time in 2008.

This is as much for me to clarify and rethink my purpose for writing here as well as for readers.

Who Am I?

My name is Mathew Needleman and I’m the author of this blog.  Sometimes I’m referred to as “the folks at Creating Lifelong Learners” but really it’s just me.  I write this with occasional contributions from others which are credited when appropriate.  I am a elementary teacher and a literacy coach working in LAUSD.  The views presented here are my own and not necessarily those of my employer.  I do not work for Open Cout Reading, I have a web site dedicated to supporting teachers who are teaching the program but I created that site on my own without the endorsement of the publisher.

This cost of hosting and running this blog is partially offset by generic advertisements that I run.  If you don’t like the advertisements, the easiest way to get rid of them is to subscribe to the blog.  The RSS feed runs ad-free.

What Is This Blog About?

If you arrived here from Open Court Resources, you may be expecting me to write exclusively about language arts.  If you arrived here from Video in the Classroom, then you may be expecting me to write exclusively about video production.

I don’t teach either language arts or video production in isolation and so this blog reflects that.  I try to balance my writing between the two but really I try to be more spontaneous than that.  If something particularly is on my mind then there might be more posts about one than the other.

I also have more than a passing interest in classroom management, educational policy, and educational technology.  These subjects appear in posts regularly.

Are there subjects that you’d like to hear more about?

I thank you for reading.

Here are all the myths with visuals from my presentation at Western Avenue Elementary…

Myth #7: Where’s the beef?

I’ve written about this before as well. Focusing on structure before starting to write can lead to bland, generic paragraphs and reduce writing to formula instead of communication. Instead, I recommend just writing and then molding that writing into a structure through revising. By frontloading too much information in the beginning, some students will be overwhelmed and shut down. Let them get their ideas out first.

Myth #8: Revising and Proofreading are the same thing…and students can’t do either.

Many teachers are students are still confused about this. Revising is about ideas and not about mistakes. If there’s an error that impedes meaning then by all means take care of it in the revising but proofreading is the stage that is about conventions and making the writing correct. Students can do both independently with your guidance as long as you are modeling how to do it and not just lecturing about it (see Myth #1).

Myth #9: Students can’t follow prompts.

Students don’t need prompts but sometimes they will have to write to them. They can learn to follow directions if you teach them how to read them and figure out what’s being asked. However, following a prompt is almost a separate skill from writing. The good news is that if you teach students how to write well then learning to write to a prompt is easy. If you do too much at one time then it’s harder for students to learn anything.

Myth #10 We write because the teacher tells us to.

We sometimes do a good job of teaching students that we read for pleasure but we rarely teach students that writing is about authentic communication and that it is sometimes done because someone wants to do it. This is why some students (some of whom eventually become teachers) hate writing. Students need real reasons to write. Let them write a presentation, a letter, a blog and write something that they care to write about.

Myth #4: Drawing is for babies.

I wrote about this already. Drawing is a valid form of prewriting and writing (see cave paintings). By allowing students to transition from drawings to labels and then sentences, you make writing relevant. Bringing visuals into the writing process also sparks imagination and allows non-writers and English Language Learners to participate in the process

Myth #5 Good writers don’t change their minds.

I have several blog entries that have never seen the light of day. I have a box of unfinished scripts. And most of my finished pieces have gone through tons of different iterations before being published. However, in many classrooms, whatever students start writing on Monday, they must take through the entire writing process. By having a publishing deadlines and not requiring students to move at the same pace within that structure, changing your mind is part of the process. Students can go back to their brainstorming list at any time and choose another idea (again, as long as they publish by the deadline).

Myth #6 Stories need a (traditional) beginning, middle, and end.

We were all taught that stories need a beginning, middle, and end but teaching that students often leads to a laundry list type of writing. Take for example, a story about visiting Raging Waters.

I went to Raging Waters with my mom. We parked the car. We bought tickets. We ate a hot dog. We rode many rides. We had fun. We were tired. We went home. I played video games with my cousin. He slept over. The next day he went home.

What is this story about? There are several possible stories in this piece of writing and few details. How about focusing on a small moment instead. How about focusing on just one ride and really noticing sensory details of the experience.

I could smell sunscreen all around me and heard the sound of ladies screaming as they rode down the slide. There were butterflies in my stomach as I climbed the steps of The Terror waiting my turn to slide down the one thousand foot drop…

Sometimes you have to just start writing and find the structure within what you’re writing. As per Lucy Calkins, it’s easier to revise a smaller, focused piece of writing then a long string of ideas.

Before teaching a writing lesson, I introduce myself to students as a writer. I tell students that I like to write. I tell them I write outside of school just because I want to. (Insert audible gasps here).

Since I have a sense of myself as a writer in the “real world” it bothers me that the way we teach writing is often artificial and bares little resemblance to real writing. Here are my problems with writing instruction, spelled out with ten myths. This is a three part series.

Myth #1: Students can write without modeling.

Without showing students how you write, they have no guidance as to how it can be done. In order to do this, teachers must be writers themselves. You don’t have to be Shakespeare but you do have to allow yourself to be vulnerable and actually participate in the writing process in front of or along with your students. If students don’t see you writing, it’s hard to believe that real people write.

Myth #2: Writers write at the same pace.

Instead of everyone revising on the same day, my students and I set deadlines for pieces to be published. Within XX amount of weeks, students may spend multiple days on the same stage of the writing process as long as everyone meets a deadline set by the class. In other words, a student might spend three days on drafting and half a day on revising but not everyone has to be working on the same stage at the same time. As we get closer to the publishing deadline, students need to commit to one of their drafts and publish.

Myth #3: Students can’t come up with their own writing ideas. They need prompts.

I used to be afraid that my students couldn’t come up with their own ideas. They can. And they do. It’s teachers who often can’t come up with their own ideas. If you model how to come up with ideas, students can do the same. A lot of times their ideas are more interesting than what they did last summer. Give them a chance.

Frank Guttler lets us into his planning for his class at Poly High in A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words and reports on his journey to Doha to see How Flat the World Is.

Christina shares her classroom holiday movies.

Joe Brennan presents the best resources for Making Movies on the Web:

Every youtube video has it’s own url. Go to the video you want. Make sure you see the video you want. Go to the address bar and type pwn after the www. like this:

www.pwnyoutube….

It goes to another page. Download as an mp4 and save.

Submit an article for the next Video in the Classroom Carnival here.

In honor of financial literacy month, here are my business and money links:

General Money Links:

Money Instructor.com

Kidsbank.com
Help you and your children explore some of the fundamentals of banking.

Kid’s Making Money
Students can find ideas for making money and suggest their own.

Kids&Money.com
Articles on spending money wisely

That’s My Piggy!
Students share their favorite piggy banks.

The U.S. Mint for KIDS
Games and information for kids

The U.S. Treasury

The U.S. Treasury for Kids

Weaving and Carding Information (for A New Coat for Anna)

Online Games

Money Factory
Quiz game for kids with information on real vs. fake money.

Edu4kids.com
Teachers can set up different games for students to play.

Fleet Kids’ Business Game
Game for students to try starting a business and watching money grow.

Spend Well

My Savings Quest

Counting Money Game

Math at the Mall

Making Sense: Hip Pocket Game

FunBrain Change Maker

Sense and Dollars Money Games

Business Links

Virtual Factory Tour
Virtually tour hundreds of factories to see how they work

Lemonade Stand Game

Disney’s Starting a Business Interactive Game

Rags to Riches: Concert Tour Organizing Game

Sim Sweatshop simulation game to teach about unfair labor practices

My K12 Online Conference Presentation, Film School for Video Podcasters, is now available through Youtube.  I’ve separated the segments into chapters so you can call up section you’re looking for or watch the whole thing.  Also scroll down for bonus material and some information on my inspiration for the movie.

Part I Introduction:

Part 2: Storyboarding

Part 3: Shot Selection, Composition, and Storytelling

Part 4: Mad Moviemaking: What Equipment Should I Buy?

Part 5: Finale

Bonus: High School Musical 2 Trailer to Illustrate the Rule of Thirds

And now a bit about my inspiration for shots in the movie…You might call me a hack but I wanted to show you how I made an attempt to draw from movie history rather than act as if I was working in a new medium.

My Shot from the Introduction:

Jack Nicholson in Chinatown:

I enter the house of Mrs. Didrikson:

Fred McMurray does the same in Double Indemnity:

Mrs. Didrikson comes downstairs in my movie:

Mrs. Didrikson in Double Indemnity:

Me driving in the car:

Leslie Nielson in Police Squad.  I could’ve also taken this shot from Hitchcock’s Vertigo but I figured Leslie Nielson is funnier.

My Mad Moviemaking Segment:

Mr. Cramer on TV:

About once a month I get the question from web site visitors who’ve seen my class movies, “How do I get started making movies in the classroom?”

This is a difficult question to answer because I really want to say, “Just Do It!” but I know people want more. Here’s my advice.

Start With a Story

I would start by coming up with a story.  Your students can do this, you can do it by yourself, or your can work on it together.  In my own classroom I write one class project with student input and then students write their own movies as well.  Your story should come before the technical considerations so as to avoid making a movie for the sake of making a movie.  My most successful class movies have related directly to our curriculum which adds an additional consideration that outside movies don’t have.

Plan Your Movie

How are you going to tell your story visually?  What do you need by way of equipment, props, costumes?

Shoot the Movie

Making a good movie is really boring and a lot of work.  I always warn my students that making a movie is one of the most boring things you can do in the world and that there will about two minutes of great excitement when they get their chance to be on camera but that the rest of the day is about sitting around.  You have to set up the camera, film a shot, and then move the camera to film the next stop…you repeat this many times during the day.

Edit the Movie

The technical ways of doing this are explained in numerous free online tutorials.  I’ve linked to them from the “Make Movies” page of Video in the Classroom.  See “Software Tutorials” on left.

The artistic/skillful side of editing can be learned by carefully watching movies.  I’d start with commercials because they’re short.  Look for how scenes are put together.  What they choose to show and why?  How fast they cut from one shot to another?

Keep Doing It

Your first movies won’t be that good.  We each wish we were Orson Welles but we’re not.  You’ve got to try again to have a chance of getting good.

Inspiration

Elona Hartjes shares her experiences making classroom movies for the first time. Check it out.

Good Luck

If you have further questions, please feel to post them here.

I just purchased the MacHeist Bundle for this year.

For only $39 you get 13 Mac utilities and 25% of the cost goes to charity.  I was at the Apple Store today and iSale, the app that helps you set up eBay auctions was selling for $39 by itself.

You probably won’t use all of the apps but if you use one or two, I figure it’s worth it.

For me, I bought the bundle in particular for WireTap Studio (I have used the WireTap demo before to record streaming audio), SousChef (for Susan), and Delicious Library (which is a bonus if you Tweet about your purchase). And there are several other apps that I’d like to try out (like the games).

There are only two days left to buy this year’s bundle if you want it.

Get your bundle here.

Here are some resources to help elementary school parents support their children in learning to read at home.  Please feel free to use if this is of use to you:

Links for Parents
(for any reading series)

Links for Parents Using Open Court Reading
page 1 |  page 2

Last year, I posted a redesign of the comprehension strategies we use with our reading series. I’ve tweaked the posters a bit and am now re-posting them.

For the uninitiated, the explicit teaching of reading strategies is supported by current research on reading comprehension instruction.  (See Put Reading First for more information).

A few versions of these posters have been circulated in my district.  What I tried to do was to replace meaningless clip-art with visuals that better support the actual strategy as per design ideas widely circulated amongst bloggers.

As I’ve been using the strategy posters in the classroom, I’ve decided to change them again to make them a little bit easier to read and  more user friendly.  If you have any feedback on them please let me know.

Comprehension Strategy Posters

Comprehension Strategy Wall Chart

Comprehension Strategy Bookmark (pictured, above left)

Comprehension Strategy Cheat Sheet

Comprehension Strategy Powerpoint

Update:  I’ve already made some subtle changes to the cards in terms of readabilty and consistency.  The above links lead to the revised cards.  Thanks for the feedback already received and keep it coming.

Some schools are cutting back on homework says the L.A. Times…

“As adults, if every book we ever read, we had to write a report on — would that encourage our reading or discourage it?” asked Eileen Horowitz, head of school at Temple Israel of Hollywood Day School. “We realized we needed to rethink that.”

I’ve learned that there are two things you never discuss amongst teachers, religion or homework.  Teachers are particularly passionate about homework.

While it’s true that the students who complete their homework tend to be the ones who do well in school, I’m not sure that doing homework is what helps a student do well.  Students who complete homework tend to have the parents who help them with their homework.  As a teacher I found that homework completion only showed me who had help at home and who didn’t. In thinking about about my own educational career, I do remember learning in class but my only memories of homework are of frustration.

I don’t think we should abolish homework completely but we might want to take a look at its effectiveness and not simply assign homework just for the sake of it.

Mathew’s Note:  This post slipped out in draft form about two days ago by mistake before it was ready.  Sorry about that.  Here’s the real thing…

Recently, I’ve encountered several schools that in my opinion have their technology priorities in the wrong order.  For example, I don’t feel that it makes sense to purchase document cameras or SMARTBoards before

purchasing reasonably up to date computers for classrooms.  What follows are my suggestions on prioritizing technology purchases.  I invite your comments additions and suggestions for my list.

1.   A TV and a DVD player (one for at least every two classrooms).  I use this for hooking up my iPod to show movies as well as a poor man’s LCD projector.  With a $20 connector you can hook up a MacBook to a TV (many people don’t know this).  It’s much cheaper to buy a TV than to buy an LCD Projector and with a TV you do not have to factor in the replacement cost of projector bulbs.

2.  A working computer.  For my taste, I would by a Macintosh because it just works and the software to create movies, podcasts, music, and organize photos are built in and well integrated.  If you have a working PC though, that’s fine.  But if you have a computer that doesn’t turn on or is unbearably slow, hooking a projector and SMARTBoard up to it is only going to frustrate you.

3.  Another working computer.  Students need to use the computer as well as the teacher.  I always shared my computer with students but I fear that some teachers keep their one computer all to themselves.  With two comptuers, I hope there’s less of an excuse to keep kids off the computer.

4.  Software.  With the Mac you may want to purchase iWork and/or Microsoft Office and Final Cut Express. I would not purchase any subscription services or software packages that essentially take over your computer.  I don’t want to mention any names but if you use a program on your computer that means that computer is only used for students to take quizzes or to act as a portal to the internet, I believe those things tend to be a unnecessary waste of money.

5.  A digital camera.  A still camera can double as a video camera (if you don’t use it too much) but the opposite is not true.  Ideally you need a still camera and a video camera.  This is vital in terms of students creating media.

If you have all those things and you’re still swimming in dough, then I might purchase a projector (do keep in mind that replacement bulbs cost hundreds of dollars), document camera, and SMARTBoard.  I want to be clear that I have nothing against these luxury items (I’d love them in my classroom).  However, teachers sometimes want document cameras before they want computers and I suspect it’s because they’re already comfortable using a projector and have no idea to use a computer.

What are your technology priorities?

Here are links for teaching about the Civil War.  Thank you to Dionne Hemphill for the latest additions to the list.
Maps of the Civil War - Library of Congress

Thousands of Civil War Photographs

The Civil War Home Page

Civil War Free Clip Art

Civil War Links

Civil War Internet Paths to Explore

Half Slave and Half Free

Carrying the Running-Aways

So I Became a Soldier

Charley Skedaddle

Historic Places Connected with Abraham Lincoln

Follow the Drinking Gourd

The History Place presents Abraham Lincoln

The Underground Railroad @ nationalgeographic.com

Harriet Tubman fantastic site

History Lessons for English Language Learners

Battle Hymn of the Republic

If You Were President Game

Teaching the Civil War with Technology

Underground Railroad Research Site

Interactive Underground Railroad Games

National Geographic

Scholastic

Pathways to Freedom

Find other resources for this unit here.

Here are resources I’ve compiled for teaching the American Revolution/Revolutionary War.  Thank you to Dionne Hemphill for the latest additions to the list.

The Road to Revolution - Game

Lesson Plans for Teaching (SCORE)

The American Revolution - Education World

Constitution Day Activities

Natural History Museum - Making a New Nation

Timeline of American Revolution

The American Revolution

The Declaration of Independence

Making of the Constitution

Articles of Confederation vs. Constitution Graphic Organizer

Kids in the House House of Representatives Site for Kids

History and Geography

History Lessons for English Language Learners

If You Were President Game

Tasks Related to American Revolution

Revolutionary War Biographies

Biographies of Women in War

Virtual Marching Tour of the Revolutionary War

Revolutionary War Online Resource

Kids Page at Valley Forge

Find other resources for this unit here.

Snooper 2.0 is a cool site that gives you a glimpse into the information some web sites capture about you.  Check it out.

Here’s a followup to my earlier list of royalty free images.

Additions by Janice Stearns…creative commons licensed…all require attribution:

Long list from Terry Roberts

OpenPhoto

Free Image Database

NASA Images

Royalty Free Clip Art

Additional royalty free image list  by Larry Ferlazzo

and royalty free music/sound effects list by Larry Ferlazzo

And my original list of favorites is still here.

Tim “VidSnacks” Holt posts another example of a teacher losing it in the classroom and being caught on video.  Students have cameras and audio recorders in their pocket?  Should we be surprised?

The teacher who was caught on tape has since resigned and the news story has interviews with union officials and administrators pointing fingers in all directions.  Teachers yell at kids all the time.  I find it a little disingenuous that we treat videotaped verbal beatings as if they’re worse than the yellings that go on every day unrecorded.  Are administrators really unaware that there are teachers on their staffs who yell?  I find it hard to believe that this was a one-time incident for this teacher.

One of the values I bring to my classroom is that kids are people.  Shocking, I know.  I don’t implement any rule that I wouldn’t expect to be a rule in a faculty meeting and I talk to my students as I would talk to my colleagues.  Have I ever gotten mad in the classroom?  Yes.  We’re people too.  But one of the most effective things I do is to say in a perfectly calm voice, “I am getting very upset with you (class) right now and I need to calm down.”  I go to my desk and shuffle paperwork for a minute and come back to the front of the class.  This works in my classroom only because students get to a point where they really care about me and know that the feelings are mutual.

Admittedly, teaching in the upper grades might be different.  But do your students know that you care about them?  I don’t mean that you bring them stickers, I mean that they know you want them to do well and are interested in what they’re interested in?  Do your students feel like people in your classroom?

a guest post on using the Sound Spelling Cards by Ann Miani

Dear Teachers,
I wanted to share a life changing teaching strategy for OCR phonics.  You can print out the Sound Spelling Card mats (see links):

Link #1

Link #2

There are some cool new versions of the large long vowel cards to print out, but they would have to be run on long sheets of paper 14 inches or so.

Green Box cards are named (all short vowel sounds)
lamb, hen, pig, fox, and tugboat.

The blue box cards are diphthongs/diagraphs titled in order
armadillo, whale, (bird card er,ir,ur,) cow card, hawk card, hoot owl card (this may be the goo card in another version,) foot card, and toy/coil card depending on which version you have.

Here is an example of how to give spelling quizzes using this SSC mat
For the technique Riddle Me This, I say these out loud while the kids write the letters that go with the cards.
1.Dinosaur card(kids would write the letter d)
2.Long I
3.Nose card (n sound)
4.Long O card (they are taught to assume it is the first spelling unless otherwise indicated)
5.Sausages (s sound)
6 Hawk Card (second spelling = au)
7.Robot card r sound (when I don’t specify which spelling on the card again the kids assume it is the first spelling on that card)

I repeat each of the letter cards in the word, while they touch each letter sound on their papers to check to see that they haven’t left any out.  Then I ask them what did I spell?  They all call out with glee and a feeling of success that they hadn’t felt until I used this technique dinosaur!

Use this with your word knowledge boards if you wish.  I give the kids 12 - 20 words per day that come from their weekly reading passages in the text and they seem to really get very large words now.  What a relief to see them spelling, reading and now writing with far more enthusiasm and success!

Before using this concept, the kids struggled with 3 to 5 letter words with both long and short vowel sounds.  Now they are spelling, reading, and writing 10-12 letter words without help.  This happened in just a month and a half.

They wrote essays this week and nobody balked about having to explain why they felt the dinosaurs died out.  They were able to justify their reasons behind their theories based in the NF story they read this week.  Only 3 out of 20 kids (who were ELD) struggled with the actual theories behind the extinction of dinosaurs.  This is a far cry from January!

I hope this helps you as much as it helped my class. Up till the time I started using this, my class was the lowest on record and the majority of them were failing.

-Ann Miani

cross-posted in In Practice.

I’m not opposed to the theoretical idea of merit pay. However, I have not read of any fair plan to address who would earn it. I have the following concerns…

Having worked with several principals, I have found that all of them tend to have favorites on staff. I would not want my pay to be determined based on how a principal personally feels about me. I also would not want my pay decided on by a single test or even multiple standardized tests that may not measure what I am teaching in class. Even though I’ve worked at low-income schools throughout my career, I have good friends who work at high performing schools and they don’t have it any easier than I do even though the pressures of working where they teach are of a different kind. I don’t think that time spent working is a fair indicator of how much a teacher should be paid since it seems to me that some teachers spend their whole summer working at school but doing little to do with instruction. Should teachers who are the most organized and spend less time working after school not get bonuses?

It seems to me that even the worst teachers want their students to do well. It’s not as if they’d teach better if only they were paid a bonus. In places where students aren’t learning it seems it’s because teachers don’t know how to do better rather than because they don’t want to do better.

Finally, in a field where we already make less than similarly educated peers in private industry, I wonder if not being able to count on a particular income would be enough to discourage promising people from entering or staying in the profession.

Your thoughts?

I’m doing a second session on using Keynote (Apple’s version of Powerpoint) on Friday, March 6 at 3:30 PM.

This session will be one part design tips and three parts technical how-to.  You will walk away with  concrete design tips and a good idea of what is possible and how to do it.

Download handout here.

See additional Keynote/iWork links here.

If you’re in the Southern California area, please join me at the CUE Conference in Palm Springs.  This Friday, March 6 at 11:30 AM I’ll be leading a live presentation of “Film School for Video Podcasters” based on my K12 Online Conference presentation.

This session will be extended and interactive featuring four parts:

Hope to see you there!

It’s time for the irregularly scheduled Video in the Classroom Carnival featuring posts  about intergrating video production and digital storytelling in the classroom.  Please submit your own articles to the next carnival here.

Production

How to create clay animation movies by Kevin Hodgson.

Dan Meyer wants students to stop relying on musical soundtracks to convey emotion.

Alice Mercer has ideas for storyboarding.

Curriculum

Kevin Hodgson shares his presentation on The Writing Processes of Digital Storytelling.

Examples

50 Incredible Stop Motion Videos from Smashing Magazine.

Christina’s Superstar Video from the Early Childhood Blog.

Dr. Seuss’s birthday, called Read Across America Day is coming next week.  Here are some activities to do for it…(by way of Doug Yonce’s newsletter.  Subscribe to his newsletter here).

NEA - Read Across America
The National Education Association annually sponsors Read Across America. Now in its twelfth year, the program focuses on motivating children to read

Seussville Read Across America
READ ACROSS AMERICA. “You’re never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read to a child.” What better way to celebrate Dr. Seuss’s birthday

Read Across America Games and Activities
A collection of activities for Dr. Seuss in celebration of Read Across America, a national reading day/week promotion

Education World: Special Reading Fun for Read Across America Day
Read Across America Day is celebrated each year on the first Monday in March. Education World offers five new lessons for recognizing this important day

Read Across America | CTA
The theme for Read Across America 2009 is “Reading is Cool!” Serving up some frosty fun for your reading delight are playful snow people created by award-winning illustrator Will Terry.

Reading Rockets Read Across America Page

Downloadable Dr. Seuss Books

Additional Dr. Seuss Resources

A blank page is intimidating.  Don’t believe me?  Take a piece of paper and write three paragraphs about what you did last weekend.  I don’t know about you but I’m lucky if I remember what I ate for breakfast.  Yet, we often give students a prompt like this and then bemoan the fact that students don’t descriptive include details or show an interest in revising what they wrote.

Lesson for the Classroom

Pictures unlock details from the brain.  You can have students bring in a photograph of something they’re going to write about or you can have students draw detailed and labelled pictures as a way of prewriting.  By appealing to students visual intelligence you will unlock all kinds of rich details and increase student engagement in writing.  Students with a picture of their dog, will think of all kinds of things to write about Spot that wouldn’t come to mind when staring at a blank page and the walls of the classroom.

Students at all grade levels can draw pictures, like storyboards, as a way of prewriting.  As an adult, I use pictures as well as a way of planning out what I’m going to write.  Don’t think that it’s a waste of time or not age level appropriate.  The time invested pays dividends later in the writing process and students at all grade levels can benefit.

Please join me at this year’s CUE Conference in Palm Springs, March 6th.

I’ll be presenting two sessions, a live and expanded version of Film School for Video Podcasters and How to Make Your Presentations Pop with Keynote.

More on those sessions later, for now, register here.

These days anything worth doing is worth doing younger and first graders are sometimes asked to write paragraphs.

Perhaps you have seen the hamburger model of writing (picture on left)?  Let me be clear, I love this model and have used it sometimes to assist in revising writing that is entirely unfocused.  However, this is no way to start the writing process.  It’s a visual for revising, NOT a plan for drafting.  If you don’t believe me, try to imagine Dostoyevsky using a hamburger drawing to write Crime and Punishment. Real writers don’t structure their writing this way.  Let’s try to teach our students to be real writers and not writers because we said so.  I think it makes the difference between raising students who write to communicate versus  raising another generation that hates writing.

I’ve seen teachers use this at the start of the writing process and the students did, in fact, have an introduction and conclusion in their writing.  And it was the lamest paragraph I ever read.  It had no soul.

Lesson for the classroom

Let students write.  Let them get their ideas out on paper without worrying about writing conventions and Big Macs.  A structure to the writing will emerge and if it doesn’t then when you get to revising you model for students how to separate a jumble of ideas into to separate paragraphs (using the hamburger if you wish).  The danger is giving students too much to think about before they even start writing.  Also, the hamburger might incorrectly teach students (and misinformed teachers) that the first sentence of every paragraph is the main idea.  Reread the first sentence of this paragraph before moving on.  Sometimes you bury your main idea a bit to keep things interesting.

How do you teach students to write paragraphs?  Do you teach paragraphing?

All elementary school teachers are teachers of writing and yet many of them are not writers themselves.  I started my career as a writer and so this week I’ll be posting a few tips on how to teach writing in a way that resembles the real world.

Tip #1 Not everything that you start writing turns out to be good.

The summer in between graduating college and life starting I spent some time writing movies.  I wrote the story of my freshman year five times before I was able to figure out the first scene of the movie.  I spent months writing what I called a modern day western before a friend told me that the movie had already been written.  Then I wrote “Earwax” a story of unrequited love in the workplace and “Earwax”  just flowed out of me (no pun intended).  I had been thinking about the topic of the movie for months and the day I started writing it, like a baby, it was ready to be birthed.

Lesson for the classroom:

I think it’s great that teaching the writing process allows students a chance to revise and make their writing better.  However, most teachers never allow students to change what they’re writing about once they get to the drafting stage of the writing process.  Whatever students start writing about, they’re basically stuck with it for the week or the month or however long the writing process takes.  Whether they want to or not, they’re taking their piece all the way through to publishing even though real writers don’t publish everything.

Many teachers complain that their students won’t revise when they ask them to.  Revising does have to be explicitly modeled and taught but, part of the problem is that students may be revising a piece of writing that they have either a) lost interest in b) don’t know much about c) decided is awful and don’t want to continue writing or d) would rather be writing something else.

Writers in the real world can change their minds.  Can our students?

I allow for experimentation by having a week of prewriting before we even get to drafting.  During the five prewriting days I model coming up with an idea and drawing pictures to get down sensory details.  Students each day get to either continue what they were prewriting the day before or start a new idea.  Some students write about the same thing every day and they end up with five days of material on Friday.  Other students have five different ideas by Friday.  On Friday students decide on their best idea and that’s the one they continue taking through the rest of the writing process.

This extended prewriting time allows students time to safely experiment with different genres and different stories that they might not feel comfortable writing if they knew they’d be stuck with it for the next two weeks.  The most striking example I can think of is a student who got up the nerve towards the end of the school year to write about witnessing the murder of her parents in Mexico the year before she entered kindergarten.  After drafting she decided that it was too painful to keep writing but we were both glad she had tried.  The student would never have gotten to that point had we stuck with writing about “what you did last summer.”

How do you handle a student who wants to change what they’re going to write about?

As I’ve posted before, decoding isn’t everything.  Students also need strategies to know how to comprehend and make sense of text.  This is sometimes hard for teachers to believe because as adults, we’ve already internalized reading comprehension strategies like clarifying and predicting.  I vaguely remember being taught about inferencing in school, I think most of my reading comprehension strategy instruction happened at home where my mom was constantly reading, modeling what good readers do, and reading stories to me while she instructed.  Unfortunately, many of my students do not have that support at home.  As children, they will not automatically figure out how to comprehend difficult text even once they begin decoding.

So how do you explicitly teach a strategy?  I’ve known a lot of teachers who think they’re explicitly teaching a strategy just because they talk about  but their students still aren’t comprehending.  I want to suggest that if you are explicitly teaching something you need to make it clear to students that you want them to learn what you are teaching.  When you are teaching a story from a basal reader, naturally you are teaching them the content of the story and students generally understand that they’re supposed to be learning that content.  However, there’s another objective for teaching that story and it’s to teach students to use the comprehension strategy.

So, at the beginning of the lesson you can tell students today we’re learning about (insert content of story here) and we’re learning how to (insert today’s reading strategies here).

During the lesson, if we want students to use the reading strategies, we can give them linguistic patterns to help them (for example, I predict ___________ because (the text or illustrations) show/say).

After the lesson, we review…how did making predictions help us to understand today’s story.

To me, that is being explicit…making it abundantly clear what you want students to learn, giving them the tools to internalize that learning, and then reviewing what they’ve learned.

According to research, it’s important that teachers explicitly teach students how to use comprehension strategies even before students are reading fluently.

• Here’s a one page comprehension strategies “cheat sheet” that lists the strategies, definitions, and has a sentence frame for each to assist teachers and students in using the strategy.

Teaching students how to answer questions (take tests) related to comprehension is also an important related but slightly different skill.  Frequently it is the inference questions that hang students up because they are used to simply finding their answer written out in the text.

• Here’s a QAR (question/answer relationship) worksheet for assisting students in taking comprehension tests and separating which questions ask for simple recall from the text and which involve interaction between the reader and the author (like inference and other think about it questions).  This form was created by Francie Kugelman.

Here are additional comrpehension resources and feel free to add your own below.

Here are some free additional photo effects for Apple’s Photo Booth program. Some of these only work in Leopard.

Cat’s Eye

and More iChat Effects

These are great fun and come by way of Smashing Magazine.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post on How to Plan a Technology Lesson, today I break down how I planned my students’ movies, We See Animals Hiding.

Unit Theme:  Look Again

State Standards: While this unit is about animal camouflage, the standard for California is more general, having to with animals and plants ability to adapt to their surroundings.  Knowing that the standard is broader than the stories in the basal reader allows you to incorporate other subject areas.  It also helps you to focus on the most important bits of your unit.

Objective: My objective was that students would be able to able to explain how and why a particular animal uses camouflage to survive.

Technology: I wrote about choosing an appropriate technology tool for the job.  Naturally teachers have a technology preference and mine is movie making.  However, I believe the tech tool (an iMac with iMovie) is appropriate because the video format allows students to combine pictures with audio.  The pictures that students choose allow me to assess whether students actually understand what they’re saying based on the appropriateness of the pictures.

Assessment: I work with the students while conducting research and writing their animal reports.  By the time students come to the computer I pretty much let them create whatever they want.  By doing this, the technology project is an authentic assessment of student learning.  If you watch the movie, you’ll hear that not all students have a firm grasp of the concept and that’s learning for me as the teacher.  However, all students working in teams of two were able to put together a couple of sentences about their animal and find appropriate pictures to add.

The Blue Skunk blog presents 7 Stupid Mistakes Teachers Make With Technology.

I’d like to address poor technology planning that I’ve written about in the past.

I think poor planning pervades education and isn’t a problem specific to technology use but one that many classrooms suffer from.  There’s nothing new or different about my method and the graphic below.  I believe many teachers’ education programs teach this way.  However, having an objective and a plan for assessment is a simple step that many teachers skip when lesson planning.

Those of us who teach a prescribed curriculum like Open Court are given our unit themes but then we need to work backwards and identify the standards that apply to that unit and choose an objective for our teaching.  For the first grade weather unit, for example, we might be teaching about different types of weather, activities and clothing for particular weather, about the tools of measuring weather…there are different ways to approach the same unit.  However, we need to zero in on something specific we want students to learn so that we can assess their learning and plan effectively.

Once we have an objective, we can then choose a technology that’s appropriate to that objective.  I don’t think we should make movies, use Voicethread, or start an excel spreadsheet just for the sake of doing any of those things.  We choose the technology that fits with what we want students to learn.

Then we must have a way of assessing whether students have learned what we intended.  Tomorrow I’ll post an example of my planning.

Happy New Year!

Over the three week holiday vacation, I moved and was without internet access for a couple of weeks. The first e-mail that came through once I was back online was from our new superintendent. I try to avoid being political in my blog but turmoil is happening throughout my district. I think I have a duty to report the facts.

1. About two years ago, the district hired a new superintendent, a retired Navy admiral with no education experience, to lead Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the largest school districts in the country.

2. About a month ago, the district fired the Navy admiral due to his lack of educational experience and inability to get things done.

3. While declaring that he “would always be [there] for their children of Los Angeles,” the fired Admiral demanded to personally be paid $500,000 plus expenses in order to leave his post at the district which is now facing bankruptcy.

4. Due to the state’s budget crisis, which is worse now than the one that faced California before the Terminator replaced an impeached Gray Davis five years ago, money is being taken from school budgets.

5. Our new superintendent is calling for mid-year cuts including letting about 2,300 probationary teachers go immediately with the required two weeks notice. (These teachers would also need to pay back money they’ve already been pre-paid for the coming school months). These cuts would save only a fraction of the $250 million dollar shortfall.

6. Literacy coaches, like myself, would be placed in classrooms immediately.

7. Our teachers’ union is calling for no cuts at all and is threatening job actions to fight the cuts.

8. Neither the district nor the union wants to trim the school year by a week which would save the entire amount of the $250 million that the district needs to cut.

I believe that no one wants to make cuts, particularly cuts to personnel, but it’s clear that cuts need to be made somewhere unless the state’s budget improves. Unfortunately, cuts to personnel and/or class size increases when done mid-year would be extremely disruptive, one might say chaotic, in terms of the shuffling of students and teachers.  I doubt whether this is a task that our district can handle purely as a matter of logistics.  None of our union contracts are even adequate to address the wide-spread shuffling and domino effect that might occur.

Even though my fiancé and I are both teachers in the same district and would be hit doubly hard by cuts to the school year.  I personally would rather see our year slightly shortened than see teachers lose their jobs.

Naturally, I suppose it’s too much to ask that someone bailout our failing school district.

For more info:  L.A. Times

Frank Guttler, who used to lead great screen education workshops for the American Film Institute (AFI), now leads the same workshops on his own (since AFI downsized its K-12 education department).

Frank  has his own blog and I look forward to reading.  I’ve added it to my blogroll in place of the American Film Institute blog which is apparently no longer updated.  If you’re interested in using video production in the classroom, please encourage Frank to keep his blog going by leaving a comment there or subscribing.

Visit Frank’s Blog, Lights, Camera, Learn here.

2008 has turned out to be one of the most significant in my life.  It was a year of great loss as as well as great joy.  Although I didn’t write so much about the latter, I became engaged to my long-time girlfriend, also a teacher, in September.  And we will be beginning 2009 in a new home.

As I review the year, I thought it might be appropriate to recap some of my favorite posts from the past year.  Here are the ones I am most proud of:

• Mr. Winkle Wakes
  Between Youtube, Teachertube, and the Spanish language Dotsub version, Mr. Winkle has been viewed approximately 18,765 times this year.  The movie my attempt to add something to the “eduporn” medium that didn’t take itself too seriously and made its point with visuals and not just text.  It was also my excuse to learn Apple’s Motion.
• Film School for Video Podcasters
  I had a lot of fun getting to play a detective and create this how-to movie for the K12 Online Conference on making better videos in the classroom.  I enjoyed the reactions to the project and being a part of the whole K12 Online experience as a presenter and participant.
• Classroom Mangement:  Appropriate Consequences
  This post had 42 comments, more than any other post I’ve written though most of them were more about differentiating instruction than the original topic.  The comments inspired my differentiation series.
• The Digital Storytelling (aka Video in the Classroom Carnival)
• I hosted seven editions this year of examples of video work from around the blogosphere.

And my three most popular posts of the year (based on Feedburner item use):

• Royalty Free Music and Images
• A Curriculum for Working with English Language Learners
• Whose Classroom Would You Rather Be In?

I thank you for reading and for the inspiration provided by the blogs I read on a daily basis.

In response to my post, Five Reasons Why We’re Not Integrating Technology in Schools, Michelle Bourgeois offers Five Reasons Why We Shouldn’t Integrate Textbooks in School.

Laura Milligan goes one step further and offers 100+ Resources for Teaching Without Textbooks.

Even though I think it’s the wrong argument to pit books against computers because we need both, the arguments are compelling and there is much to be said for some technology taking the place of printed matter in classrooms.

The librarian at one of my schools this year is published illustrator, Diane Greenseid, who has a great web site herself.  She also recommended the following sites that were new to me:

Just One More Book
Audio interviews with authors and illustrators compiled.  You’ll find almost any author on this site.

Guys Read, a site created by Stinky Cheese Man author,  Jon Scieszka.
Trying to motivate boys to read, this site makes suggestions for books that appeal to boys and even adult males.

Planet Esme, from author Esmé Codell
Engaging format to expose you to Esmé’s books

Mrs. P, in a hilarious format, Mrs. P. shares stories with you
thanks to Angele Maiers for the link

For additional storytelling resources see:

Literacy Blogs

Sharing Stories Links

Reader’s Theater

Daniel, who teachers second grade in a rough Sacramento school that’s in year 5 of program improvement under NCLB, asks, “Do you use any certain classroom management system that you could share?”

I’ve written about classroom management before but in answer to the question about whether I have a classroom management system, the answer is no…if by system you mean do I use color coded cards or some program you buy to make the students act well.

I do use table points at the beginning of the year because nothing gets students to sit up straighter faster than the awarding of points.  If that seems silly, notice how many times we as adults collect points for things like shopping at the supermarket, flying on a particular airline, using a particular credit card, buying a certain amount of yogurt or getting our hair cut at a particular location.  Extrinsic though it may be, as humans we do seem to be hard wired to collect points.  I have sometimes used individual points when I’ve had students who were not yet motivated by the success of a group and needed individual encouragement (I call those students first graders).

However, two important things about this system are:

1. There are no rewards for winning.  Okay, sometimes I give a sticker but by and large there is no prize.  When you win the game, you’ve won the game.  That’s what the Lakers get when they win…the satisfaction that they’ve won.  So even though this is an extrinsic system, it’s not about getting a reward, it’s about doing well.  I also don’t spend my money buying stuff or contribute to a consumer gimme, gimme culture.

2.  I phase this out by about Christmas.  I don’t have a date set when I stop using the points.  It’s just that over time students start sitting up and looking forward because I’ve trained them to do so when I speak.  They know that if they don’t put the manipulatives down when I say to then I take them away.  As soon as students are quickly doing what they’re supposed to, I just start forgetting to use the table points.  Why take the class time to use something that you don’t need.  Occassionally a student will remind me in March or April that I haven’t given any points lately.  Then I have to give one to a team that’s doing a good job but then I don’t use the points again after that.

My student teacher told me I was the least strict of all her teaching student assignments.  I say this so you don’t think I’m a big meanie.  But at the same time I was always accused of having my class stacked with all the good kids (this wasn’t true) because when we walked across the yard, my students walked in a line.  I had higher expectations for my students.  I’m quite honest about this, “Now, when we go out there, you may see other classrooms running and jumping around screaming but we’re not going to that.  It’s important that you walk in a line and wait quietly to be called into the cafeteria.”  Maybe what my student teacher meant when she said I wasn’t strict is that I don’t yell.

In response to my article on Making Classroom Rules, Cami asks,

Should the teachers make the rules, or should it be a collaborative thing between the teachers and the students?

I love this question.  As always, this is my personal opinion and what works for me.  While there are many opportunities throughout the year when I involve my first and second grade students in decision making and setting standards and consequences for behavior, I believe that when students  come in on day one, the rules are already set.

My class rules are:  1. Be polite.  2. Listen and follow directions.  3.  Make good use of your time.

These are posted and I do expect students to know them and have them memorized.  If your students can’t tell you what your rules are, then what good are they?   There’s nothing remarkable about my rules but it took me a few years to iron them out.  I think these are the only rules in the classroom and everything else is a procedure.

For example, “Don’t hit” isn’t a rule, it’s something that’s done as a result of following “Be polite.”

“Make good use of your time.” isn’t like don’t get up and don’t talk to your neighbor, it simply requires that you use your time in the classroom well.  If you need to solve a problem by getting up or talking to your neighbor, then that’s following the rule.

If given a chance, I suspect that students might get to the general idea of my rules though they would likely be less precise.  So why don’t I have students create those?

• As a matter of classroom management, I get a group of squirrely first graders entering my classroom on a Monday (after being in kindergarten the previous Friday) and I’m expecting them to sit still while we iron out our classroom rules?  Everything on that first day is quick and deliberate so that I don’t lose them.  As I’ve always had a majority of English Language Learners and I don’t know yet how much English they know, it seems better to discuss what our class rules mean than to implant the vocabulary necessary to create our own.
• Comfort and security.  While some see rules as oppressive, I see my own rules as setting up clear and safe boundaries in my classroom from moment one.  I want my students to feel safe and be able to keep to those rules from our first walk around the room.
• It’s disingenuous.  I suspect that some teachers have students “create” the rules but really only take suggestions and mold them into the class rules they wanted in the first place.  What’s the point of that?  It takes much longer and students might immediately get the message that you really don’t want their opinion if you reject their suggestions.
• Who’s in charge?  Students will have many opportunities to have input on class activities.  But about those three rules…they’re non-negotiable.  Those are the rules.  There’s no negotiating and I do want students to know that on day one.

I hope to hear from some teachers who create their own rules.  I know of several who do and are great teachers.  I have nothing against it.  However, I wonder if it really adds to the success of a classroom.  I know that the thinking is that if students have a part in creating the rules, they’re likelier to follow them.  I wish it was that easy.  I just don’t see it.  Whatever your rules are, 90% of your students will likely follow them.  The 10% who don’t follow rules probably won’t follow rules set by you or set by other classmates without training and your consistency in enforcing them.

Tomorrow’s post is about my classroom management “system.”

Applications to the Apple Distinguished Educator program whch are taken only every other year are now being accepted for 2009.

Consider applying if you are an Apple using educator.  Benefits of the program include having a strong network of like-minded individuals who support and encourage you for life as well as ocassional access to Apple software products.  Obligations include speaking at conferences about Apple products.

You must also attend a summer institute in Orlando, Florida in order to become a part of the program.  Read about my Apple Camp experience here.

I had some anxiety about applying to the program two years ago but it’s been one of the best things I’ve done for myself professionally and personally.  I encourage you to apply by visiting Apple’s web site.

To paraphrase Chris Lehman in his five minute Ignite Philly speech on the Schools We Need:

Good data costs more than we want to spend in this country and the best data is the data that teachers collect every day.  The best data is the work kids do every single day.

I agree with this statement.  Teachers are constantly collecting qualitative data about their students that is just as valid as any quantitative data collected from tests and quizzes.  However, as valid data we need to treat it as such. While every teacher has a vague idea of the academic progress of his/her students, it is the skillful teacher who that data to strategically plan instruction and monitor progress.

I think the best way to use this collected data is to record it.  Speaking for myself, in the course of a particular lesson I notice that Sally has trouble with the spelling of long u and Tommy doesn’t know how to rhyme and it’s crystal clear to me in that moment in time.  However, by the time I’ve gotten home at night, unless I’ve written this down and made a plan, I’m just kind of praying that Tommy and Sally might practice these skills and come back to me tomorrow “fixed.”

I don’t have any elaborate recording system for these things.  However, what I’ve been starting use is a low cost program called MacJournal from Mariner Software.  This is a mac only program.  I’m sure there is a PC equivelant, please leave a comment if you know of one.  This is basically a journaling program (as the name implies).  It allows you to create mutliple journals and multiple entries.

What’s different from a program like Word is that each entry is automatically dated and collected with all the others.  There’ s a search box so you can search for names of students or particular skills (e.g. search for any reference to Tommy or any reference to rhyming words).

What’s different about this from an online gradebook is that a gradebook is for recording numbers.  Numbers have their place but they belong to the less useful category of data.  A journal allows us to keep track of what’s between the lines.

I use it very simply, just to make a few notes that are stored and recorded for me to find later to make independent work time groups or plan mini-lessons.  I don’t necessarily write in complete sentences and I don’t write about every student every day.  I just jot notes down when they occur to me on a post-it and then transfer it to the journal.  This is a new thing for me so I’ll let you know how it goes. I am open to suggestions and would love to hear how you keep track of data.

How do you keep track of student data?

Here are unit opener ideas submitted by teachers for each of the Open Court units.  Please submit your own ideas here.

Kindergarten:

School
Shadows
Finding Friends
The Wind
Stick To It
Red, White, and Blue
Teamwork
By the Sea (submit ideas here)

First Grade:

Look Who’s Reading/Let’s Read
Animals
Our Neighborhood at Work
Weather
Machines in the Garden
Things That Go
Captain Pinkney’s Journey/Journeys
Games
Folktales
Keep Trying
Being Afraid
Homes

Second Grade:

Sharing Stories
Kindness
Look Again
Fossils
Courage
Our Country and Its People

Third Grade:

Friendship
City Wildlife
Imagination
Money
Storytelling
Country Life

Fourth Grade:

Risks and Consequences
Dollars and Sense/Dreams to Jobs
Mystery to Medicine
Survival
Communication
A Changing America

Fifth Grade:

Cooperation and Competition
Astronomy
Heritage
The Civil War (2000)
Making a New Nation (2002)
New Frontiers/Going West
Journeys and Quests

Creating Lifelong Learners has been nominated for an Edublog for Best Individual Blog and Best Teacher Blog.  I remember last year when I was a new blog and tried to nominate myself (it didn’t work).  This year I thank Joel, Kevin, Elona, and Larry, and Angela for their nominations, for their own blogs, and for joining me in conversation over the past two years or so.  Without the interaction, I might have stopped blogging several times along the way.

This blog represents my sanity as a teacher.  When I see things in schools that bother me, like teachers doing most of the talking, students being written off because of labeling, computers used for drill and kill instead of creativity, etc., I write about it here and feel like at least I’ve gotten it off my chest.  I’m glad that others have appreciated my writing.  Please take a moment to register your vote.  And thank you for reading Creating Lifelong Learners.

I have renamed the Digital Storytelling Carnival to the Video in the Classroom Blog Carnival with this which would be edition #7. As before, the carnival spotlights blog articles on using video production in the classroom which includes digital storytelling and general video production. I’ve come to understand that digital storytelling refers to a specific genre of movies and think it’s time I stop confusing the two (sorry about that).

And now, on with the show…

Classroom Examples

Kevin Hodgson presents his students clay animation projects cleverly written to show examples of literary elements such as foreshadowing and characterization.

Christina shares an Alphabet Movie made with Animoto and shares the process of making the movie as well as some thoughts on Digital Storytelling and Shel Silverstein.

Spooky Book Trailers from Sonja Cole.

Mr. Mayo presents Short Films by Middle Schoolers.

Steven Kimmi shares A Day at Schilling Elementary.

Professional Examples

Esquire Magazine presents the Five Most Misleading Propoganda Films of the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s.

Oral History: Telling Their Stories
Survivors of wars, the Holocaust, and Japanese internment camps share their stories.

Geography at the Movies, non-profit site for sharing movies of different locations around the world.

Instruction

Wesley Fryer presents Research Based Suggestions for the Digital Storytelling Process as well as Examples of Digital Storytelling Projects.

A Research Report on Student Generated Videos in the Classroom.

Resources

Larry Ferlazzo gives us the Best Ways for Students to Create Online Videos (Using Someone Else’s Content)

Royalty Free Music and Images Resources

Tutorials

Film School for Video Podcasters. My own presentation on how to make better classroom movies.

How to use a green screen by way of Alec Couros.

I was sitting in a grade level meeting recently and realized that I was surrounded by other former filmmakers and actors.  (This might sound unusual but remember I teach in Los Angeles).

Our goal was getting students to include sensory details in their writing and here are several ideas that might help you.

1.  Have students act out an experience before writing about it.  Staring at a blank page is hard by having that kinesthetic experience of having acted out a story will help you to write about it.

2.  Visualization (also known as Method Acting)…you have to lead students through this.  You don’t just say imagine you were there.  You ask students to close their eyes and take them back through the whole experience.  Imagine you’re in the location where you experienced kindness who’s there with you?  What are they wearing?  How do you feel when you see them?  Take a moment and notice what’s around you.  What do you hear?  See?  Is there are a particular smell to this location? It’s kind of like a mini-mediatation.  It definitely helps.

3.  Have students draw a picture and label it.  Graphic organizers are en vogue for good reason.  However, I think they’re of greatest value in helping students to revise their writing once they’ve gotten something down.

I’m working with first and second graders who can hardly read so staring at a bunch of words on a chart doesn’t really help jog their memories.  I don’t think graphic organizers help too much with non-readers and English Language Learners in the prewriting phase of the writing process…with one exception.  I am big fan of the ELD practicums rolled out in LAUSD that use color coded Thinking Maps to get English Language Learners to write sentences.  This highly structured and scaffolded method allows even the lowest levels of English Language Learners to write sentences.  However, the goal here is sentence formation and vocabulary, it’s not necessarily about authentic communication.  Students are writing a sentence about steamboats, for example, to practice writing a sentence correctly, not because they want to write about steamboats.  This practice is also important, don’t get me wrong, but many times we only “practice” and then throw out the idea of writing as communication and that’s what I don’t want you to do.

4.  Talk about it.  Also helpful and quick is to just have students talk about what they’re going to write before they write it.  If they can speak it, they can write it even if the spelling isn’t right.

Thank you everyone for your recent comments on whose classroom would you rather be in?

Teacher A

Teacher B

As a blogger I’m experimenting with asking open ended questions but at the same time it’s hard not to weigh in on my own questions.

I guess I have two major problems with Teacher A’s rules.  Everything that we say as teacher we have to mean.  In other words, if we have a ridiculous rule, we have to enforce it.  I would say the rule “Don’t talk” is unenforceable.  Students are just little people.  Ask teachers to complete an activity and notice whether or not they talk.  If teachers can’t do it, how can students?

Now, of course, there are times that students must be quiet.  When someone else is talking, during some protected reading time, when there’s an announcement over the PA.  However, to expect dead silence while students are working independently for an extended period of time (particularly when we’re developing the oral language skills of English Language Learners and supporting students who may not be able to work without the help of their neighbor) is impossible.  If a teacher says “No talking” and then has no consequence for a student talking then the teacher loses their authority.  Their word means nothing.  I would argue that we should change the rule rather than add a consequence.

Similarly, the rule of not letting students get up eliminates their ability to solve problems like getting a pencil or a paper when they need it, putting back supplies, stepping outside the classroom door to vomit (that one’s from personal experience and I”m so glad I do allow students to get up when they need to), etc.  I want my students to get up and help themselves when I’m unable to help them.  After I stat working with a small group, my priority is helping those students, not finding other students’ pencils or getting students a particular worksheet when they can easily help themselves to materials and know where to find them.

Another problem with Teacher A’s rules is that they’re all written in the negative. I hate to even say that because it’s almost a cliche.  It does say not to frame your rules in the negative in most classroom management books I’ve read.  However, I do think it’s true that a rule like “Respect others” is much more powerful than a rule like “Don’t hit.”  Also “Respect others” includes no spitting, no talking while others are talking, no pulling hair, etc.  It’s inclusive of a lot of stuff whereas in a room where the rule is “Don’t hit” it’s technically okay to put chewing gum in Sally’s hair.

“Respect others” is more about teaching students the golden rule whereas “Don’t hit” is about following a rule cuz the teacher said so. What I like about Teacher B’s rules are that even though they are still rules, they all support and foster the development of a community that supports each other and helps each other.  I’d rather be in that room.  But no one asked me.

Additional Classroom Mangement Articles

Nominations for the annual Edublog Awards are now being taken.

Here are my nominations:

1. Best individual blog:  Elona Hartjes—Teachers At Risk
Elona’s blog continually inspires and encourages me both in my personal and teaching lives.

3. Best new blog:  Angela Maiers
A little more than a year old, Angela writes consistently about traditional and new media literacies.

4. Best resource sharing blog:  Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day
Larry posts so many web sites that it’s hard to keep up with them all.  There’s something for everyone though if you stick around long enough.

5. Most influential blog post:  Why Can’t Inner City Kids Learn? by City Teacher
I don’t know if anyone else has read this one but it certainly has influenced me in my teaching. 

6. Best teacher blog:  Kevin’s Meandering Mind
Kevin’s coolness comes across from his blog.  Just when you think you’ve got him pegged as a claymation-ing rock n’ roller, he surprises you by becoming a comic book creating master “day in a sentence writer”.  He’s the kind of teacher whose class you want to be in.  I read to come along for the ride.

11. Best educational use of video / visual:  Marco Torres’s Flickschool
Marco posts short movies on how to make movies and I love them.

13. Best educational use of a social networking service:  Classroom 2.0
This one might be too obvious of a choice.  However, it’s still the perfect entree into the world of blogging and educational technology for those just beginning to dip their toe in the water.

Final thoughts:  I read many blogs (over 100 are in my reader).  I would like to nominate several more if only there were appropriate categories or the ability to nominate more than one.

Independent Work Time Rules:

Teacher A

Teacher B

On Using Music in Video Podcasts

It’s important that the music you choose to use in your video productions matches the mood of your project. Some of the K12 Online sessions had funeral dirge music during moments of inspiration and it kind of killed the mood for me.

If you want good music you have to move beyond the built in music on your computer. It used to be extremely hard to find music you had permission to use but no more. It does take a little searching to find the perfect piece but plenty of royalty free music is now available to teachers and students.

Do be sure to credit the artists of every piece you use

Royalty Free Music Sites

Kevin Macleod
This guy has great movie music that’s easily searchable by mood and style. I don’t know how he makes a living cuz he’s giving good stuff away for free.

CC Hits Ning
Quite a few good tunes though the site is not easy to search and a little buggy when it comes to previewing songs

Podsafe Audio
good stuff, great variety

Moby Gratis
Recording artist, Moby, makes some of his discarded tunes available free to filmmakers
If you listen to the tracks, they’re mostly ambient, ephemeral pieces though I did find one I liked for my Film School for Video Podcasters project.

Jamendo
royalty free stuff, though I sometimes suspect some of the “public domain” material really isn’t

Jonathan Roberts
interesting stuff that I didn’t use for my last project but might use in the future

Jimmy G
I didn’t find anything that I used from here but it’s another option. Requires registration.

Archive.org
This site contains music and video that is supposedly in the public domain…I have found a few examples on the web site that are not in the public domain and so I’m a little bit hesitant about using some of the material in video projects.  Nevertheless, this is a great web site with tons of material.

OpSound
I haven’t used this site yet, navigation is not entirely intuitive

Sound Effects/Foley

Sound Effects
great site for sound effects

Soungle

Absolute Sound Effects Archive

Free Sound Project

Royalty Free Images

Pics4Learning.com
a free product of Tech4Learning—these are images donated for classroom use
I always start here in the classroom because there are no inappropriate images and the site is simple enough so that I have taught first graders to navigate it.

Free Images Donated by Photographers
This is my second destination when I can’t find what I’m looking for on pics4learning. They are not necessarily for educational use but are available free and taken by real photographers who are willing to share their images.

Flickr Creative Commons Images
has images taken by photographers of different abilities (amateur and professional) which you can use according to their Creative Commons license.

PlinkMe
free images for web pages

iStock Photo - only $1 a picture
If you still can’t find what you want or are going to use your images in commercial projects, why not pay $1 per photo and use the image legally? These site has pictures of almost anything you would want.

Use the challenge of respecting copyrights as a teachable moment for students. How can we ask students not to illegally download music if we steal images?

Free Clip Art

http://openclipart.org/

http://www.school-clip-art.com/

Related Posts:

Fair Use Resources

Computer Using Educators: Los Angeles presents its annual tech fair, Integrate, Innovate, and Inspire on next Saturday, November 15th at Virgil Middle School.

I’m not presenting this year. (Since I’m now on the board I have other responsibilities). However, it’s still an excellent an opportunity to take a few workshops locally from some of the great minds in educational technology.

There are workshops for beginners (blogging, podcasting, etc.) and advanced users alike (Alice for animation, iPods in education, etc.).

Register here or Download a Flyer

While I worked at Saturn Street School, I had the pleasure of being involved with a grant with Antioch University that revolved around assisting English Language Learners. Teachers in the grant chose areas of their practice to research via inquiry projects that examined both quantitative and qualitative student data and aligned with best practices in teaching English Language Learners. We presented our work at a national conference in Washington D.C. last year.

Last month, as a culmination of the work we did through the grant, Antioch University released a free curriculum for working with English Language Learners. Included are strategies and resources, a complete guide for K-8 Schools, as well as general information about our work.  However, the true power of the process was that teachers chose their own topics for study.  Rather than assigning a “research based” curriculum to teachers, teachers planned their own lessons but then did the research to refine and enhance their practice.  The lessons learned about the process of providing similar constructivist professional development are included on the web site as well.

The publication of these materials marks the end of years of hard work.  The hope is that they can be of use to others.  Please download and share.

TLC Grant Web Site

I spent a couple of hours this weekend hopping in and out of the K12Online Chat Room and listening to all the reasons why we should integrate technology in the classroom.  Someone in the room proposed that if only every teacher in the world would watch just one session from the K12Online Conference, we could change the world.  I think that’s a bit of hyperbole (unless it’s my session that the teachers watch).

I’ve developed list of reasons why we’re not integrating technology in school.  At one point it was just a lady from Ireland in the chat room and myself and we talked about our respective schools.  I mentioned that I was often the only techie at my school and she said “me too.”  I told her we have a prescribed curriculum and she said “me too.”  So this list, naturally, is focused on the United States but I get the sense that it might apply other places too.

It’s not that I wish to be pessimistic.  However, unless we can come up with solutions to these problems, we’re not just going to be change the educational landscape.

• Technology is expensive.
  The way we fund education, it is clear that education isn’t a priority.  It seems even less money makes its way to the classroom as much of it is funneled into central offices district bloat.  We can’t pay teachers enough and now we want computers in addition.  Not only is there a cost to buying computers there is also a hidden cost of tech support that districts must provide when putting computers in classrooms.
• Technology is broken or unavailable.
• Technology use isn’t tested.
  I’m not proposing we implement standardized computer-use testing.  However, let’s face it, if NCLB mandated such a test we’d all have computers.  As long as we want standardized test results from students we’re going to have standardized teaching that attempts to align with those tests.
• Technology lessons often aren’t well planned.
  Student engagement isn’t enough.  I know of several great technology using teachers who are terrible teachers. They can get their computers to work during a lesson but they don’t seem to know the first thing about having a learning objective or know how to assess whether students have learned what they’re trying to teach.  The fact that students have fun is just peachy but it doesn’t justify the expense I’ve already talked about.  Technology use needs to be aligned with standards and the appropriate tool for the job—and not simply be based on the availability of particular equipment.  If you have limited equipment then you have to find a way to get that equipment to fit your lessons and not the other way around.
• Fear of losing control.
  It’s not so much a fear of using the technology but a fear of allowing students to teach their teachers how to use that technology.  For the same reasons that teachers could never live without Xerox machines and worksheet companies stay in business, that inquiry and research, independent work time, and workshop are the least components of our prescribed curriculum, many teachers don’t want to risk giving up control to integrate technology.

Please add to my list and/or provide some solutions.

I watched all of the presentations from Week Two that were available as movie files.  I skipped any wiki presentations and audio podcasts.  I’ve heard from other teachers who prefer the latter kind of presentation but I feel like I can see wikis and download podcasts any time.  What’s unique about the conference in my mine is the opportunity to see movie versions of teachers’ presentations.

Backchanneling in the Classroom by Scott Snyder
presentation link | Scott’s blog
This presentation was one of my favorites because the idea presented was totally new and novel to me.  Mr. Snyder has students chatting with each other on laptops at the same time that they have a class discussion in his English class.  This allows all students, even those who rarely participate orally, to participate and increase engagement.  It’s like a high tech version of pair sharing that we do in the elementary grades but better since it involves the whole class together.  He uses it also as assessment tool by examining the text of the chat at the end of class sessions. The biggest obstacles for most of us is not having enough computers for everyone and the intense classroom management.  Scott wisely included interviews with students in his presentation.  One thing I would’ve liked to have seen is the text of some of the chats perhaps intercut with the class discussion.  I wonder how it supports and enhances the regular class discussion.

Monsters in Bloom in our Wiki by Ann Oro and Anna Baralt
presentation link | Ann Oro’s blog | Anna Baralt’s blog
Teachers had second graders create monsters and then write detailed descriptions of them using adjectives.  Students at another location had to recreate the monsters using only the written descriptions reprinted on a wiki.  I liked this presentation because it was directly applicable to early elementary students, age appropriate, and not too technically difficult.  They also went out of their way to plan their project to align with Bloom’s taxonomy and higher levels of thinking and connect the technology to writing and the inclusion of sensory details.  Teachers often skip this planning piece.

Games in Education by Sylvia Martinez
presentation link | Sylvia’s blog
I’m already a fan of Sylvia’s but she did an effective job in this presentation of making the case for games by linking game playing to learning through the ages (and even in animal behavior).  At the same time she takes a hard line on traditional educational computer games which basically replicate paper flash cards on the screen and yet remain the most popular type of classroom games.  She shares LineRider a physics type game which I wasn’t familiar with and Phun, a virtual physics sandbox.  If you’re interesting in using video games in the classroom, check this out.

Changing Disabilities:  Using the MacGuyver Approach by Beth Lloyd
presentation link | Beth’s blog
I will never forget Beth’s story of a student with selective mutism who was scared of saying hello to school personnel in the hallway.  Beth recorded people like the school nurse and principal saying hello to the student on a voicethread.  By playing the voicethread for the student and having the child get used to the voices and faces of the different personalities, he was able to say hello when he saw them in the hallway.

Leverage Points for Insping Change by David Warlick
presentation link | David’s blog
There’s a reason why David keynoted the conference the past two years.  He has a charming down home personality and although I can’t say I learned anything new from his presentation, he effectively makes the case for educational change and I loved his use of Leopard’s Quicklook feature (which allows you to click on a file and press the space bar to bring up a preview), and found the twenty minutes I spent with him thoroughly enjoyable.  Stealing the show is his son’s cover version of a Ben Fold’s song, created in Garageband using overdubs of a euphonium.

Current Leadership Models are Inadequate for Disruptive Innovation by Scott McLeod
presentation link | Scott’s blog
Scott presents the ideas of Dr. Clayton Christensen’s work on Disruptive Innovations and argues that in the same way cassette tapes overtook vinyl, CD’s overtook cassettes, and mp3s overtook them all, education is on its way to be overtaken by a new model that he predicts will take over in 2019.  It’s fascinating stuff although I don’t see what in education is going to cause this disruptive innovation and undo the well established infrastructure of real estate and ideology that is thoroughly established.  The whole structure of schools needs to change and I really don’t see how the advent of the internet alone is going to facilitate that.

I thank everyone for their entries into the K12 Online Conference.  I like this model of professional development and would love to see a literacy conference, a math conference, how to help English Language Learners, etc. presented in a similar online format.  I think technology for technology’s sake may not be the answer but if we really want to change education we might have to look at the total picture.

My session for the K12Online Conference, Film School for Video Podcasters, is now online.  Scroll down to the bottom of the page to download for your iPod or to watch on your computer.

The sixteen minute presentation is a series of short vignettes framed by a film noir detective story in which I play the detective (of course).

The inspiration for the project was being a video judge in an internationally known technology contest and seeing the poor quality of submitted projects.  Even though the topic of the projects were very noble, the student use of the medium of filmmaking was horrendous.  What I was judging were powerpoints that moved and not movies.

I maintain that video is not the language of the twenty-first century.  It’s the language of the twentieth century and we’re just now catching up.  So, I do consider it important for teachers and students to have a basic knowledge of the language of film.  This movie is an attempt to help teachers gain that knowledge.  After sixteen minutes you won’t be an expert but I hope you will begin to think a little bit more strategically about your work with video in the classroom.

In the movie I discuss:

• Storyboarding
  Almost everyone knows that you have to storyboard but there aren’t many models for teachers on how to storyboard.  Here I try to show you step by step.
• Shot selection
  I talk a little bit about the meaning behind certain shots as well as how to set them up to be aesthetically appealing.
• Equipment
  In a nod to my hero, Jim Cramer, I present Mad Moviemaking in which I answer questions on what kind of equipment to buy (because these are the questions I get most often about videomaking)

Woven in between those sections is my opinion on the importance of teaching media literacy via media production.

I plan on posting a bit more about my process of making the movie later but suffice it to say that it was a lot of work.  I welcome your feedback below.  Enjoy! 

The first week of the free K12 Online Conference is over and it has been great fun to download four presentations each morning and have the chance to watch them later in the day.  I also participated in the live chat at the conclusion of week one.

I am in awe of the thinking, planning, and creating that has gone into creating the K12 Online presentations and I know first hand how much work goes into creating and producing a twenty minute short film for the conference.  My presentation, Film School for Video Podcasters, goes live on the last day of the conference.  I spent several days putting my trailer together and then several more days putting together filming and editing the actual presentation (I ended up getting sick at the end of it so I don’t necessarily recommend it).   I am honored to be a part of this conference.

I must admit, however, in the spirit of NotK12Online’s request for critiques, to some disappointment in some of the presentations that suffer from what I dub powerpoint-itis. The same text heavy visually lacking powerpoints that make much professional development unbearable has made its way to some of these downloadable movies.  While the conference allows for any type of presentation, I would suggest that a slideshare might be a better format for what is essentially a powerpoint with narration.  Although I recognize the work that goes into creating an audio podcast or a wiki, I must confess that I didn’t check out any of those.

On the live chat, someone mentioned that video editing is a twenty-first century literacy.  While the technology to create movies has certainly gotten cheaper and more readily available, moviemaking as a medium has been around for over a hundred years and the concepts of editing and shot composition have had a long time to develop.  Keynoter, Dr. Stephen Heppel, says “It Simply Isn’t the 20th Century Any More…So Why Would We Teach as Though It Was?“  When it comes to videomaking I say, “It Simply Isn’t the 20th Century, Why Are We Teaching as If the 20th Century Didn’t Come Before the Century We’re In Right Now?”

Making movies is not a new medium and so I do expect a bit more from some of the great minds in educational technology in terms of being literate in the visual medium in which they’re working. If you’re able to watch a movie without the visuals or if the visuals actually take away from the audio, it’s a sign that visuals aren’t very effective. It’s a shame if the meaning of a project is obscured or unsupported by the visuals.

These are the highlights of the conference’s first week for me.:

Steven Kimmi - Traveling Through the Dark
I’m a bit biased because I feel as though I’ve been present with Steven on his journey through the dark since he reached out to me via a link to my blog from his early on on his journey. Steven pinned his presentation on an effective metaphor supported by visuals and even his chosen (albeit too loud) music. He provides a great starting point for teachers just beginning to use educational technology and not knowing where to start. If you’re brand new to the using technology in the classroom, I might start with this presentation.  Steven’s just a regular guy so he makes you feel that if he can do it, so can you.

Brian Crosby - Video Conferencing, Easy, Free, and Powerful
If you want to use Skype in your classroom, Brian’s presentation wisely starts with practical applications of the technology and he shows examples but then he also includes includes how the technology works in a concise and well organized thirteen minute presentation.  It takes restraint to stay under the twenty minute conference limit.

Kathy Cassidy and Patrick Lewis - We Like Our Blogging Buddies
This presentation shows a high tech way to conduct what we call dialogue journals in our kindergarten classes where students have an adult respond to their writing and ask them questions. In this case, pre-service/intern teachers interacted with first graders via blogs. The presentation uses children speaking in their own words about the experience. It’s hard to go wrong when you use students. I really appreciated the presenters insights they shared when they said they might focus in the future on the content of student writing and not so much on punctuation, spelling, and conventions as they did. As someone who has to constantly remind teachers to separate their teaching of proofreading from revising, I concur.  Surely the power of blogging can go beyond teaching students to use periods.  Kathy correctly identifies that the power as in giving students an audience beyond the classroom.  What a great way to have young students develop a sense of themselves as writers.

Alec Courus - Open, Social, Connected: Reflections of an Open Graduate Course Experience
I first discovered Alec when he left a comment on my Mr. Winkle Movie on Youtube. I found his clever grad school class trailer by following a link to his profile and downloaded it to my iPod. I don’t know much about this guy but I think we have mutual feelings for each other’s movie work. The content of his presentation (about open source curriculum for college courses)  isn’t entirely applicable to my work as an elementary teacher but I think it speaks to the power of visuals to make a presentation compelling. Alec didn’t make a powerpoint, he made a movie. Check out the Forest Gump/Zelig like insertions of Alec into famous situations at the end.

Sara Kajder - Promise into Practice
I had never heard of Sara before and I was sorry she wasn’t online for the live chat. Sara presents on action research, like I completed recently with Antioch University, where teachers implement a teaching strategy and collect data to see how it’s working. Although I felt like her visuals probably didn’t go beyond the level of typical powerpoint and it’s hard to read some of the text, her honesty and insights made the presentation worth listening to. Of particular interest was what she said about the struggles of implementing technology in middle school because of students reluctance to any tool used by teachers. Students felt like teachers would take what was fun and mess it up and even asked to go back to worksheets. I wished that we could have seen examples of the student work she talks about.

If you’re still with me, H Songhai’s What Did You Do in School Yesterday, Today, and Three Years Ago? is also worth checking out. Mr. Songhai has a great voice (I mean, the guy could do voiceovers) and a compelling personality that elevates his presentation to the level of poetry. He also skillfully uses pacing of his movie to allow you to reflect and absorb.  It reminds me of one of my favorite films, Sans Soleil.

I’ll be posting more on the conference and my own presentation as the week goes on.

Have your students participate in the upcoming election using this ballot created by Francie Kugelman, frequent web site contributor….

Download Election Ballot

Unit Specific Unit Openers

I hope you checked out:

Jose Rodriguez’s Open Court Unit Opener Ideas including incorporating realia.

City Teacher’s ideas for Collaborative Unit Openers where teachers split responsibilities across a grade level.

Alice Mercer’s ideas for supporting unit openers in a computer lab setting.

Jane Little’s ideas for planning higher level thinking questions in the City Wildlife unit.

And Leila’s reflection on the difficulty of teaching multiple grades and planning unit openers.

I’d also like to add a special thanks to Francie Kugelman, Stephanie Penniman, and Jill Kilbrosky who sent their entries in to me or posted on the discussion board even though they didn’t have their own blogs.

Also, two first grade teachers who sent in ideas for Things That Go.

Here’s a visual of a strategy for working with small groups during Independent Work Time at the elementary level.  This works if  you have at least a 20-40 minute block of time to work with students and can spend at least 10 minutes with two groups each day.

The idea is that you meet briefly with your students are lowest in a particular skill every day but you do not ignore students who need enrichment or those who need just a little bit of help to get to the next level.  It’s a mistake to spend much longer than ten minutes with your struggling students as the law of diminishing returns kicks in after awhile.

Let’s assume you’re working on fluency…in ten minutes with your lowest readers you can review sight words, do phonemic awareness activities (such as oral blending and phoneme replacement…change the sound /b/ in bat to /c/ = cat), phonics activities (like the phonemic awareness activities but with letter cards or white boards), AND  read some decodable text.

With your middle and higher students you can work on Reader’s Theater or something like literature circles/book clubs where the group is all reading the same book and you come together to discuss it.

However, this post is more about the management of your IWT/Workshop that I hopes makes it seem possible to both address struggling students and challenge/enrich others.

You will, of course, need to adapt the timing to the size of your class and groups.  Also note that you don’t want to keep the same students in the same groups all the time, their grouping depends on the skill that you’re working on at the time.

For literacy coaches and those interested in increasing student literacy, here are a few related blogs that you might be interested in reading:

Reading Rockets Blog
written by a mom raising young readers, this is a practical blog about teaching children to read from a trusted organization

Angela Maiers
A mix of traditional literacy and educational technology, Angela—my Twitter friend—has posted several powerful articles related to our teaching of reading and reading comprehension.

What the Research Says
short blog posts on reading research

The Stenhouse Blog
From Stenhouse Publishers, this blog aims to sell books but provides articles with several noted authors in their catalog

Two Writing Teachers
From two members of the National Writing Project, Two Writing Teachers encourages better teaching of writing by asking teachers to become writers themselves.

Literate Lives:  Good Books and How to Use Them With Kids blog

Literacy Coach Resources

The Online Literacy Coach
Grace Chiu’s  blog offers ideas about coaching practice and information on authors.

WNY Associates
Of particular interest to literacy coaches, this blog offers insights on teaching and coaching.

Literacy.Coach
this blog seems to be written anonymously but  might have some good tips

And of course, literacy coaches might want to join Literacy Coaches.com, the free professional networking site for coaches.

I received this question by e-mail today:

Hello Mr. Needleman,  I was wondering if there was an Internet source or a book that gives ideas for Workshop?  My school is a “Ditto” and “Worksheet” IWT kind of school and I am scrambling for ideas.  I am starting IWT over today and am hoping for ideas soon.  I have asked fellow staff members but other than the worksheets, they have not been of help. I teach 3rd grade and my students reading abilities range from None-to 3rd.  Thank you so much.

And it reminds me of a question I asked my coach, “Where do we find all these fabulous activities to do during Workshop/Independent Work Time?

It took me a while to realize that it’s not about finding and adding additional material to your day.  It’s more about extending and expanding the work you are already doing in class.  If you agree that Worksheets Don’t Grow Dendrites then you probably agree that there are probably enough worksheets in the Open Court Reading Program that we don’t need to add any more while students are working independently.  Instead, this is the time that students get authentic experiences putting the skills the workbooks expose them to to good use.

Here are some program areas you can extend for IWT/Workshop:

Blending/Word Knowledge (students practice reading the words, complete word sorts, or use the letters to make new words—like Making Big Words books)

Decodables (partner reading, highlighting target sounds or high frequency words then sorting those words)

The Concept/Question Board (when do students have a chance to interact with the board, answer questions, and add to concepts?  If students have brought in artifacts this is when students can explore them, write about them, and ask questions)

Inquiry (not so much the Inquiry Journal but real inquiry and research…find the answers to your questions…read a book, find a web site…make a book, a poster, an oral presentation, a movie, a puppet show, etc. to present your work)

Writing (students complete writing projects you’ve started together, write a letter to the class pen pals, or write to (gasp) communicate perhaps a song, a poem, a play…if you’ve ever modeled it they can do it)

Reading (students can read for pleasure and explore books related or unrelated to the units…they can log books they read, prepare books reports, write a sequel, or do something else Beyond Book Reports.

Reader’s theater (it’s free and increases fluency according to research)

Over time you can add some of these activities as well which might be may do’s:

• Listening center (students listen to tapes of the stories or other audio like famous speeches)
• Multimedia center (a computer with headphones allows students to watch unit related movies or explore links
• Games found at the 99 cent store, as you find them add them to your repetoire

You may notice that all of these activities require very little preparation.  I was criticized on my post about differentiation for expecting all teachers to be superstars.  I don’t.  I admit I’m a lazy teacher and all of these activities will take you less time than running off worksheets with more engaging and beneficial results. It’s not about working harder but working smarter and letting go of an attachment to ditto machines.

I invite my readers to post their own ideas and any questions you have below.

For additional information on Independent Work Time/Workshop see related posts.

Reader’s Theater Page

Favorite Authors:

Dr. Seuss Page

Shel Silverstein Page

Aesop’s Fables

Hans Christian Anderson Stories

Hans Christian Anderson Biography

Learing to Read Sites:

Starfall

Book Adventure free Reading Motivation Program

Storyplace free elementary library

Virtual Picture Books from Ms. Cositas (English & Spanish)

Literary Genres:

Literary Genre Info by Ms. Ott

American Folklore Stories Tall Tales, Myths and Legends

Myths and Legends

Tall Tales

The Paul Bunyan Story

Online Stories:

BookPALS Storyline Online

Between the Lions Stories

Children’s Storybook Online

Children’s Books Online

The Call of a Story: Storytelling Web Site

International Children’s Digital Library

(these require iTunes):

Children’s Fun Storytime Podcast

Candlelight Stories Podcast

Aesop’s Fables

Kiddie Records Weekly

stories from the past

Seussville Create A Book

Book Wink.com

book talks to get students excited about reading

Free Books to Read Online

Publish Your Own Books:

TikaTok
create your book online, print and published as desired

Student Treasures
receive one free hardcover class book if you offer book for sale to parents

Computer Using Educators: Los Angeles presents its annual tech fair, Integrate, Innovate, and Inspire on Saturday, November 15th at Virgil Middle School.

I’m not presenting this year. (Since I’m now on the board I have other responsibilities). However, it’s still an excellent an opportunity to take a few workshops locally from some of the great minds in educational technology.

There are workshops for beginners nd advanced users alike and they include Alice for animation, iPods in the classroom, moviemaking, blogging, podcasting, and more.

Register here

or Download a Flyer

It’s been an honor and a pleasure to find these gems from the edublogosphere this week in this the It’s October 1st, Are You Sick of Halloween Yet? edition of the Carnival of Education.

Classroom Management or How to Deal With Students Coming Down From a Halloween Sugar High…

Elona Hartjes reminds us that a Positive Attitude is Key to Maintaining a Positive Classroom Environment.

No Trick or Treater Left Behind

NCLB:  Looking Backward and Forward in eduwonkette.

Teachers to the Rescue! Is it always a problem when students don’t understand? asks Mark Pullen.

Can We Even Reach Every Student? asks Joel in So You Want to Teach.

Courage, Do You Have It? in the Reading Workshop discusses what it takes for students to face failure and still succeed.

Some districts give high test score credit to students who don’t even show up! in the Core Knowledge Blog.

Things To Do Instead of Trick or Treating…

The Trash Can Game:  Teach Kids to Reduce Trash by Judy Sommers.

Make Ice Cream or at least give students the skills they need to be the ice cream makers of the future by Diane Weir.

Make Lemonade.

Play Some Video Games, or wait, will it make kids more or less obese than eating Halloween candy?  Sharp Brains weighs in and then offers Brain Teasers for when you’re done.

Get Philosophical with Miss Profe.

Get a Master’s Degree in Right on the Left Coast.

I Found A Piece of Educational Technology in my Candy…

Larry Ferlazzo, dressed as a top ten list for Halloween this year, presents the Best Web 2.0 Applications for Education in 2008.

Tech & Te(a)ch Is edtech helping or hurting? asks Travis a Wittwer.

Tom Woodward had something to say about this too in There Are No Shortcuts.

Scott McLeod surveys to find out if we’ve made any progress in technology integration since last year.

Thanks to Skype, Pat’s No Longer on the Outside Looking In.

Mark Graybill tries out open source operating systems in class and reports the results.

Trick or Treat or Math and Science…

SteveSpangler (the cool science experiments guy) tells us how to make Giant Soap Bubbles.

The Science Goddess is back from being AWOL to ask What Is the Purpose of Teaching Science?

Mrs. Bluebird asks Science Lab to Stay After Class.

Nucleus Learning tells us How to Teach Science.

Math Is Fun Too

Green Eggs and Math. Mister Teacher  hates open-ended questions.

Bobbing for Votes

A Mathematician for President (hint: he’s not currently running), the story of James Garfield by Let’s Play Math.

Election 2008:  A Lesson on Media Bias by the Tempered Radical

Scary Costumes

Grades:  A Necessary Evil by Travis A Wittwer who trick-or-treated by this carnival twice.

Tweenteacher finds herself in a passionate battle between angry fans of the Twilight novels and asks what her role is in the debate? Then she reviews Breaking Down by Stephanie Meyer.

Reign of Terror in NYC Educator.

Instincts in Under Assault:  Teaching in NYC.

Trick or Treaters Who Can’t Get Along…

Is TSL the Answer? Should we reduce Total Student Loads? asks Joanne Jacobs.

Essential Conflict in Leader Talk argues that a little conflict is just what the field of education needs.

Old Andrew reports on the second part of his Holiday from Hell.

The Real Job of Socialization in Life Without Schools

Education Problem Solving 101 by Dave Saba

Law Vibe reports on NYU Students Paying Cash for Class.

In this corner, learning styles are important…now fight it out…enjoy the match at Lead from the Start.

Students suspended for a barbecue in the school parking lot.

$700 Billion Dollar Candy Bailout

Blues, Basements, and Bailouts: A kid’s eye view of the crisis and other thoughts from Bellringers.

The Culture of No Fail Failure, History is Elementary, asks if we’ve sunk to the point where we no longer allow failure.

Wholesome Costumes

Family values in my home town by Nancy Flanagan.

After the Candy

How Do You Still Love Teaching (Let Me Count the Ways?) asks Tracey Rosen.

A Musical Interlude

Are First Act Musical Instruments Worth the Price? asks Thomas J. West.

Bill Cowher’s Piano Lessons

Trick or Treating Without Leaving the House:  Homeschooling

Homeschool Memoirs

Does Anyone Still Read Books Anymore?

Jane Goodwin does.  How about that jacob in Sarah, Plain and Tall?

And the story of The Milkman.

And that’s all folks!  Submit an article to the next carnival here.

In California, our unit assessments which align with the Open Court Reading series aren’t from the publishers of Open Court but from the Sacramento County Office of Education.

The tests’ emphasis on timing students reading leads teachers to teach reading in a dibels-like fashion with reading passages typed with numbers of words written at the end of every line.  While a certain amount of practice with these passages might reduce stress level on the day of the tests, a steady diet of “fluency passages” will surely turn students off to reading for life.

In college did you ever try to read through one of your texts as fast as you could?  How much of it would you remember if you did?

Aside from turning students off to reading, research has shown that techniques like Sustained Silent Reading (SSR) and Drop Everything and Read (DEAR) are less effective at increasing students’ fluency levels because students are reading independently and not receiving any feedback on their reading.  More effective then would be partner reading or group reading where students are reading with others.  Fluency passages lend themselves to testing.  Even if students have partners, their goal is usually to see how many mistakes each other makes and to figure out how fast they’re reading (that’s the point of a fluency passage).  If you have taught your students to offer corrective feedback when reading fluency passages then why not teach them to offer corrective feedback when reading authentic literature or anything else that’s more interesting than a sheet of text with numbers?

While there are plenty of free fluency passages available (and again I say a little bit might be healthy if continue to assess using the same format), I would strongly recommend teachers using reader’s theater packets instead of fluency packets for daily fluency practice.

There is tons of free Reader’s Theater available and I’ve written before about how to use it. Reader’s Theater is generally more interesting, it demands that students read together, by nature it emphasizes prosidy, and it encourages rereading for a genuine purpose.

I’m honored to be hosting the Carnival of Education this week.

I hope you’ll join me in what promises to be an exciting assortment of articles related to education.

I’ll compile the entries and post them here on Wednesday, 10/1. Please get your articles in by 9/30. See you there!

Submit Your Entry Here

Here are the slides from a parent workshop I led for parents on how to help your child learn to read at home.  This was for an audience of several English Language Learners and so there is some Spanish and references to Spanish mixed in.  I tried to keep the slideshow as visual as possible.

Additional Publications

Reading by 9 Parent Guide

Put Reading First

Organizational Support

Reading by 9 Child Literacy Initiative

Reading Rockets

Federal Government Help Your Child Learn to Read

Reading is Fundamental (RIF)

Now your students have a chance to create their own campaign ad for their presidential bid thanks to the National Constitution Center.  Due to the tongue in cheek nature of the campaign commercial that results this is probably most appropriate for older students like fifth grade to middle school.

Visit Ad-o-Matic here.

Students take a picture of themselves or upload a photo, choose a party, pick issues that are important to them and then the site does the rest. It does not let you choose your policy. In other words, I say I care about the environment and the site says I want to install air fresheners in buildings.

Mac users may need to fine-tune the settings to get their built in iSight camera to be recognized but otherwise this was really easy to make.  To get past the novelty and result in some real learning, you’ll need to discuss the issues in greater depth.

Here’s the commercial I created…

Now is about the time that you begin to hear grumblings in the teachers’ lounge about the lot we’ve been given and their ability to work independently.  One of the things that makes me cringe is to hear that a particular class of students will not be doing independent work time this year because “these students” don’t know how.

My answer is that of course they don’t know how.  It’s our job to teach them.  Independence is not a state standard but it is essentially a content area.

Not teaching students how to work independently is like not teaching students how to read because they don’t know how.  Yes, some classes come in and they work better on their own than others but if they can’t work on their own, that’s where you come in.

Don’t give up on your independent work time because students don’t know how to do it.  Those students who don’t know how to work independently are the ones who need you the most.

For more information see:

• Questions about Independent Work Time
• Give Up Control
• Independent Work Time.com

At the top and in the middle of your Concept Question Board should be a banner with the name of your theme on it.  I’ve created a series of banners for almost every unit in both OCR 2000 and OCR 2002 that can be printed out and put up.

I’ve used photos rather than clip art because I find photos much more powerful.  They help to focus students’ attention on the theme.  I’ve purchased the photos iStock Photo or downloaded royalty free images.

You can find the banners by selecting your grade level > unit > and then Concept Question Board (choose banner).  Or you can jump to any of the Concept Question Board pages here.

Here’s an engaging activity for teaching parts of speech through song.  This is particularly useful for English Language Learners.

Post a large piece of butcher paper and have multiple colored markers available.

Prompt students for a list of adjectives which you list on a color coded chart.  Do the same for nouns, verbs, and prepositional phrases.

You then have students choose three adjectives and one of each of the other parts of speech.  You then sing across the chart to the tune of “Farmer in the Dell.”

Sample chart.  Image from Husby’s habitat,

Completed chart, image from my classroom.

(to the tune of “Farmer in the Dell”):  The ADJECTIVE #1, ADJECTIVE #2, NOUN, the ADJECTIVE #1, ADJECTIVE #2, NOUN, the ADJECTIVE #1, ADJECTIVE #2, ADJECTIVE #3, NOUN VERB PREPOSITIONAL PHRASE.

For example…”The green, hairy, monsters, the green, hairy monsters, the green, hairy, funny monsters stomp through the forest.”

This works well as a sponge activity before or after recess/lunch.  I leave the chart up and refer back to it.  When we need a verb, for example, I might say, “Remember, action words…the green ones on our chart?”

You can repeat this activity when starting a new unit as a way of getting student familiar with the new vocabulary for each theme.  I don’t require that they use fossil vocabulary, for example, when on the fossil unit but some of it naturally creeps in and makes its way to the chart.

The idea for the “Farmer in the Dell” chart was taught through Project GLAD but I’ve seen it elsewhere as well.  I’m not sure they created the idea.  It was first taught to me by my mom.

For the K12 Online Conference I will be presenting Film School for Video Podcasters.

The inspiration behind my presentation is seeing a rise in the amount of student and teacher video making over the past couple of years while seeing very little increase in artistic quality. I hope to show in my twenty minute presentation a few simple tips for making better movies (whether you podcast them or not) that use a visual language and increase students’ ability to analyze media critically.

Here is a preview of my upcoming presentation:

If you cannot see the movie above (because it is blocked at your school site) please view the movie on TeacherTube below. It’s the same movie but it plays better on Youtube (above) if that’s an option):

Now in its second year, the free K12 Online Conference 2008 will be held the last two weeks of October.  There will be forty presentations which will be released two per day.  However, once the presentations are available you can view them at any time.  Indeed, the presentations from previous years are still online and available for viewing (see right side of page).

There will be some live conversations as part of the conversation.  However, not only is this conference free, it is also one you can attend on your own time at any time.  As before, the new presentations are available as downloads you can watch on your computer or put on your iPod.  If you are the least bit curious about what’s available in educational technology, there is no excuse for missing out on this.  You don’t even have to register for this kind of conference.

Since you’re not watching the presentations live, you can even “walk out” in the middle and no one will know if you find one that you’re not interested in.  It’s all about exploring and seeing what’s out there.

I will be presenting a session called “Film School for Video Podcasters.”  More on that later…

Perhaps I’ve been a little too obtuse in my discussion of the Concept Question Board as related to Wikipedia and Jung’s theory of collective unconscious.

Let’s step back a little and make sure you have the basic things that  you’re supposed to on the board…

See this image larger.

Also related:

• Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Concept/Question Board but were afraid to ask
• Concept Question Board Banners
• Other Concept Question Board Articles

Here’s an awesome site found by way of Macworld Magazine.  It organizes primary sources by keyword and historical event and allows you to move from one to another as if you are unlocking a vault.  It’s a great way to take an exploratory approach to learning about history and to engage visual learners.

This question comes frequently from special education classrooms who are teaching the Open Court Reading Program…

I have a classroom of fifth graders reading at a first grade level.  Can’t I just teach my fifth graders the first grade curriculum?

While fifth grade students may not be able to read, they can certainly comprehend, are curious, and need access to the content contained in the fifth grade curriculum as much as they need to know how to read.  Maybe they can’t read but they’re not babies.

If you’re teaching fifth graders the first grade curriculum (which includes things like we take a boat to travel somewhere on the water) your students are falling behind not only in reading but also in content knowledge.  You are putting your students at a severe disadvantage in school as well as life.

That said, it’s difficult teaching a program that’s rigorous to students who are far behind.  However, program components like the workbook, the reading anthology, and word knowledge are all done whole group.  You are providing exposure to concepts that students won’t master yet but they will need.   I would hope that in special education your pacing can be modified to allow a longer period of time to work on the same units.  Nevertheless, just like in the regular ed classroom, your differentiation comes from your independent work time/workshop period.  That is when you meet with small groups, pre-teach, reteach, and support students in ways that are specific to them.  During that time, if you want to bring in a first grade decoable book to reteach the /i/ sound then feel free…although you might do better to bring in some authentic literature in that time to not only reteach skills but also support students’ appreciation of literature.

For more on Special Education, read Special 2 Me, written by a special education teacher who teaches Open Court, or Teachers At Risk, written by an always inspiring Canadian educator.

Teaching with Documents. Primary Source material for teaching about the Constitution.

Constitution Day wiki.

Constitution Day FAQ with activities from the Constitution Center.

Library of Congress Constitution Day resources.

Education World Constitution Day activities.

Here are some more activities for Constitution Day.

And a movie, just for fun.  (If Youtube is blocked in your school, download this from home. Here’s how to do that).

One of the first blogs I started reading was City Teacher’s Teaching in the Inner City.  The blog has moved to a new location.  I recommend this blog to practicing teachers because it’s incredibly focused on the realities of the classroom without getting too theoretical or sickeningly saccharine.

A few posts to get you going:

Why Can’t Inner City Kids Learn?

Building a Community of Learners in the Inner City Classroom

How to Start Mornings:  Getting Students On Task

Friendly Letters Using Thinking Maps

I look forward to future posts and welcome City Teacher back to the blogosphere.

We can spend our time crying about how students spend more time watching TV and less time reading or we can provide them with the analytical skills they need to process and think critically about the TV they are watching. This becomes increasingly important as media is being delivered to students on smaller and smaller hand-held personal devices.

Perhaps the best way to teach media literacy is by having students create their own media. In the same way that we teach reading comprehension through writing we can teach media analysis through media creation.

Media Creation Links

Video in the Classroom.com
my own site dedicated to integrating video production in the elementary classroom

Flickschool.com
has free movies you can watch to improve your moviemaking talents

American Film Institute Screen Education Program

Media Literacy Links

PBS Don’t Buy It
Kids’ Media Literacy Site

PBS Media Literacy Quiz

UnderstandMedia.com

Center for Media Literacy

An Introduction to Media Literacy

Media Literacy Online Organization Index

Recommended Reading

Reading in the Dark
recommended by Roger Ebert for teaching students to analyze films

Article: Why Media Literacy Matters

For teachers: A fourth grade student addresses the Dallas Unified School District to ask if they believe in him and his classmates.  “You better,” he says and I’m paraphrasing, “because they’re showing up next week.”

For administrators: Here’s a list of what not to do this year as an administrator (or literacy coach) from the Shrewdness of Apes blog.  It’s a list written with wit and candor but yet it remains respectful.  Here’s one example:

2. Telling a room full of people you appreciate them is very nice indeed. Telling five individuals on your staff you appreciate something specific they have done is far nicer.

Special thanks to Jen Wagner and Joanne Jacobs for the resources.

Have a great school year to everyone!

What: Technology & Learning invites K-12 students to participate in the sixth annual digital photography contest. The competition, open to all K-12 students, challenges you to capture—and share—your unique vision of the world. If you have an artistic side, you also have the option to digitally enhance your photos with your favorite imaging software. The best digitally enhanced photo wins a special prize from Adobe. Other prizes include a digital camera, Adobe Photoshop Elements, and more!

How: Enter the best possible photo. Your photo may be submitted “as is” or you can manipulate it using photo editing software. If you do choose to manipulate your photo digitally, submit both the original and the manipulated photo so we can compare.

Click here to enter.

Mark Pullen posts his Student Bill of Rights.

It’s hard for me to pick a favorite but I’ll choose #9…

9.  All students have the right to receive cutting-edge instruction and to spend significant in-class time focusing on current technologies.

As most teachers prepare to return to school, I’ve been overhearing conversations about classroom themes, not curricular units but themes for the room environment.  Which would be best?  Under the sea?  Hawaii?  The old west?

While I must admit I think it’s awesome to see a six year old’s bedroom decked out with pirate decor (and I suppose ballerina themes are cool too), I’m not sure if these themes, as they are used, do much toward supporting the curriculum being taught in the rooms in which they are used.

I’m not against cuteness.  However, while an engaging room can support student engagement, if the room environment is just fluff, the stuff on the walls can become as engaging as wallpaper.

Here are a couple of examples of room themes that support the curriculum…

For a storytelling theme, create a cave with crinkled brown butcher paper.  As the earliest recorded stories were paintings on cave walls, have students retell family stories by drawing on the cave walls.  By the end of the unit the room is a story.

For an ocean unit put up your under the sea theme but as the unit progresses discuss the different animals around the room.  Don’t just discuss the clown fish and point at the wall but bring him off the wall and create a chart with students labeling the parts of the fish.

Even though I do have a few things up on the first day, like a bulletin board of my favorite books, and a Concept Question Board, as soon as possible I replace the prefab bulletin boards with student work and remove store bought posters to put up posters created with student input.

The room should be a living, breathing entity that students interact with.  Anything else is just wallpaper.

excerpted from Classroom Management for Teachers.com

First Day of School Activities

Things to do before starting year of Open Court Reading

Lots of First Day Activities from Cape Brenton Victoria School Board

First Day of School Activities by Katie Hallum

First Days of School Script for Teachers by Katie Hallum

Back to School Preparation Checklist and Month by Month Schedule for First Grade by

Terry Analore

Everybody Needs A Rock Activity by Jan Tappan

Activities for First Day by Scholastic

Interest Inventory for getting to know your students

Nine Questions to Ask Students on First Day of School by Elona Hartes

101 Things to Do on the First Day of School

Math Activities for the Beginning of the Year

Article: Reviewing the Steps to Take Before Starting the Year

Ice Breakers

Kathy Schrock’s First Day Activities/Ice Breakers

Teachnology Ice Breakers

Ice Breaker List

Ice Breakers and Warm Ups

Welcome Letters

These can be adapted for any grade level and were created using Printshop:

First Grade

Second Grade (Spanish/English)

More sample Letters from Scholastic

First Day of School Read Alouds

First Day of School Books

General Information on How to Set Up a Concept Question Board

Unit specific Concept Question Board resources:
(choose banners to print Concept/Question Board theme banners)

Kindergarten:

School

Shadows

Finding Friends

The Wind

Stick To It

Red, White, and Blue (2002)

Teamwork (2002)

By the Sea (2002)

First Grade:

Look Who’s Reading/Let’s Read!

Animals

Our Neighborhood at Work

Weather

Machines in the Garden

Things That Go

Captain Pinkney’s Journey/Journeys

Games

Folktales

Keep Trying

Being Afraid

Homes

Second Grade:

Sharing Stories

Kindness

Look Again

Fossils

Courage

Our Country and Its People

Third Grade:

Friendship

City Wildlife

Imagination

Money

Storytelling

Country Life

Fourth Grade:

Risks and Consequences

Dollars and Sense/Dreams to Jobs

Mystery to Medicine

Survival

Communication

A Changing America

Fifth Grade:

Cooperation and Competition

Astronomy/Back Through the Stars

Heritage

The Civil War (2000)

Making a New Nation (2002)

New Frontiers/Going West

Journeys and Quests

General Information on How to Set Up a Concept Question Board

In order to foster a love of reading it’s important to include additional literature related to your unit theme in your classroom library. Here are direct links to recommended literature.

Kindergarten:

School
Shadows
Finding Friends
The Wind
Stick To It
Red, White, and Blue
Teamwork
By the Sea

First Grade:

Look Who’s Reading/Let’s Read
Animals
Our Neighborhood at Work
Weather
Machines in the Garden
Things That Go
Captain Pinkney’s Journey/Journeys
Games
Folktales
Keep Trying
Being Afraid
Homes

Second Grade:

Sharing Stories
Kindness
Look Again
Fossils
Courage
Our Country and Its People

Third Grade:

Friendship
City Wildlife
Imagination
Money
Storytelling
Country Life

Fourth Grade:

Risks and Consequences
Dollars and Sense/Dreams to Jobs
Mystery to Medicine
Survival
Communication
A Changing America

Fifth Grade:

Cooperation and Competition
Astronomy
Heritage
The Civil War (2000)
Making a New Nation (2002)
New Frontiers/Going West
Journeys and Quests

Alice Mercer has her unit opener plans completed do you?

Do you know how to plan a unit opener?

Here’s a few ideas to get you started for Unit 1:

• Kindergarten: School Unit Openers
• First Grade: Look Who’s Reading/Let’s Read! Unit Openers
• Second Grade: Sharing Stories Unit Openers
• Third Grade: Friendship Unit Openers
• Fourth Grade: Risks and Consequences Unit Openers
• Fifth Grade: Cooperation and Competition Unit Openers

Submit your own ideas here.

This list is as much for me as it is for anyone else.  These are programs that I like to have on any Mac that I’m using.  They are each free, sometimes with donations accepted/requested:

3-2-1 Timer Widget
this is a visual timer widget that’s extremely valuable in classroom management and professional development

TubeTV
allows you to download videos from Youtube

Senuti
that’s iTunes spelled backwards…can download audio and movie files from iPod to computer

HandBrake
rips movies off of DVDs and converts them for iPod

VersionTracker
is a fantastic web site where I found all these programs

The What Works Clearing House (About [them] link) has published their findings on the Open Court Reading Program saying that there is no evidence to support or not support its effectiveness in improving student achievement due to variables in control groups and the addition of other interventions in Open Court schools:

No studies of Open Court Reading© that fall within the scope of the Beginning Reading review meet WWC evidence standards. The lack of studies meeting WWC evidence standards means that, at this time, the WWC is unable to draw any conclusions based on research about the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of Open Court Reading©.

See the full text of what they have reported here.

For those of us in the classroom we can walk around a be bitter like these teachers or we can continue to find ways to make our teaching work as effectively as possible.

Thank you to Larry Ferlazzo for link to article and Susan Ohanian for link to video.

It’s the back to school edition of the Digital Storytelling Carnival.  Welcome!

Experiments
around the blogosphere a variety of filmmaking experiments have taken place in the past two months…

Mr. Mayo experiments with Clay Animation

An (Aspiring) Educator tries out Moodstream

Wes Fryer reflects on Stop Motion

Mr. Guhlin tries to Stomp a Video

Mr. Larkin demos Posterous

Mr. Hernandez suggests using a Teleprompter for when students don’t remember their lines

Vicki Davis reports on Second Life Filmmaking

Dean Shareski experiments with embedding finished projects

Larry Ferlazzo suggests we Go Animate! and while we’re at it create an online puppet show

Tim Holt finds value in VoiceThread

Langwitches tries out Mixbook

and JustRead tells of the Making of a Digital Story

Focus on The Flip

Mr. Pendergrass reports that the Flip Video now works with iMovie ‘08

Flickschool confirms it

Issues and Policy

Alice Mercer presents Youtube, The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

Is Google Making Us Stupid? from the Atlantic.com

Mac Tech Resources

iMovie ‘08 Links

Final Cut Express Links

Frame by Frame Stop Motion Animator for Leopard

Web Sites

Telling Their Stories:  Oral History Archives Project

Simple Creative Commons Flickr Search (for royalty free images)

Viral Video

100 Best Youtube Videos for Teaching from Smart Teaching

Viral Marketing Review
kinds of viral advertising…excellent for a unit examining commercials/marketing

Spotlight on FoodFight: Reenactments of famous wars with food

Sushi and Sashimi on TV, Nick Pernisco warns us not to ban television but to teach kids to use it responsibly

Technical Resources

iWork Tutorials
free movies you can watch on Apple’s web site which show you step by step how to complete tasks in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers

Design Resources

Newsletter First Aid

Make Captivating Graphs and Charts

Before and After Slides from Garr Reynolds

Powerpoint Do No Harm
Powerpoint Do No Harm

Royalty Free Images

Pics4Learning

MorgueFile.com

Flickr.com/Creative Commons

More Royalty Free Image Sites

Numbers

Numbers vs. Excel

Links for Further Info

Apple One to One Membership
for those wanting unlimited one on one classes from an Apple store for a year

iWork School Site License
for only $250 you can purchase a license for up to 500 computers at a school site

Grants for Teachers
Donors Choose.org

Just for Fun

The latest edition of The Carnival of Education is up today at one of my favorite blogs, Joanne Jacobs’.  Check it out.

For my class Integrating Technology in the Open Court Reading Program we will be creating anti-bullying public service announcements.  Here are some resources for the projects:

Facts About Bullying

Parenting Bookmark Facts About Bullying

Bullying Facts and Statistics from Safe Youth.org

Bullying Defined and More Facts from Targetbully.com

Facts About Teen Bullying

Keys to Safer Schools:  Facts About Bullying

Facts About Cyberbullying

Stop Cyberbullying.com

What Adults Can Do About Cyberbullying

Delete Cyberbullying (with two examples of anti-bullying PSAs embedded)

Real-life Cyberbullying Stories

PSA Examples

Cyberbullying Talent Show

Cyberbullying Kitchen

Also see:  Cooties for PSA Parody if you need a little levity after reading all this

I’m frequently asked about classroom grants. Here are a few grants I’m aware of as well some lists for further exploration.  Good luck!

Grants I’ve Won

Donors Choose
easiest grants you’ll ever write…use for requests of less than $400
you can ask for whatever you want…I received books as well as iPods

Best Buy Teach Awards
rewards existing technology programs to further your tech efforts

Other Grants I’m Familiar With

ING Unsung Heroes Awards
not entirely familiar with this one but it was won by Jeff Felix in LAUSD

British Petroleum A+ Education Award
the requirements for applying for this grant are scary looking; that’s the good news…the scarier looking the greater your chance of receiving the grant because fewer people apply

Adopt-A-Classroom
attempts to hook up classrooms with corporate donors to receive used computer equipment…I did try this but was never adopted

Lowe’s Toolbox for Education

More Lists of Funding Opportunities

TechLearning List of Grants

Internet4Classrooms List

Department of Education Grants

California Community Foundation

Computer Technology Grants

Lego Education List of Grants

Teachers Network Grants

Teachers Count

Grant Writing Tips

Apply. You can’t win if you don’t apply.  You always have an advantage over people who don’t show up to the party.

Recycle. Keep copies of grants you’ve written.  You don’t have to redo a budget for every single grant.  Once you’ve completed a budget you can just tweak it and use it to apply for multiple grants.

Don’t Sweat It. You never know what a particular donor is looking for.  Don’t pull your hair out applying and do expect rejection.  Put your best foot forward, mail it in, and then mentally move on  You can’t base your whole teaching program on getting a grant.  If you get a grant, consider it a bonus.

Let me know how it turns out!

Thanks to Kevin for sharing this comic book which aims to teach about Fair Use from Duke University.

I want to share my favorite Fair Use resource…I absolutely love the Barely Legal Radio program here in Los Angeles though I always listen online since I’m in school at the times when it’s on the radio. Jaime Escalante is hilarious and because I dabble in the film biz, I get a lot of good information from the show. If you have an interest in entertainment law or want to hear about fair use from a lawyer, this is a great show for you.

Also see:

Hall Davidson’s Fair Use guidelines for teachers.

Wes Fryer’s Copyright 101

Stanford’s Fair Use Legal Page

Recut, Reuse, Recycle:  Article on the Legality of Mashups

Royalty Free Images/Music

Copyright/Public Domain Slider

Leila presents 21 Ways to Get Your Child to Write This Summer (or during the year)

Speaker Sue offers Presentation Tips, encouraging presenters (and professional development providers) to treat adult audiences like adults and she encourages them to keep their cell phones ON.

Jacquie gives Online Literacy Strategies.

I found this movie totally by accident when looking for public service announcements.  It’s a parody with kids warning about the dangers of catching cooties on the playground.  It’s hilarious. Enjoy!

My friend, Nick Pernisco of Understand Media presents this film which makes the case for teaching students how to responsibly view media rather than banning their access to that media.  It’s similar to my case for teaching student to safely use Google rather than banning Google.

I will be taking a one week vacation from my laptop this week.  I will not be checking e-mail, updating my sites, or approving blog comments in that time.

I think between blog reading, twittering, linkedin, and all the rest I’ve  become a tad addicted to the internet and especially because I have some legitimate business to do I’m going to try putting it all away for a week to take a legitimate vacation.

I’d like to be able to sleep late without feeling like I need to get up to go online.  I’d like to give my hands a rest from typing.  And I’d like to experience life for a week like what it was before computers. I know that I will be going through withdrawal for a few days but after that it should get better.

I have a few posts that will go live in my absense.  However, I won’t be back in person until August 6th. Thanks for hanging in there.

Article on differences between Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express.

Complete keyboard shortcuts.

Quicktime Pro.

Also see iMovie Bootcamp Links for recommended links and inspiration.

(Special thanks to Joel Zehring and John Woody for their assistance in finding links).

Jennifer Jacobson, assistant editor, of American Educator, a publication of the American Federation of Teachers shares this article on what the research says and doesn’t say about teaching English Language Learners.  It’s a lengthy report with the takeawy for me that it does seem that English Language Development (ELD) is best when taught as a separate subject and not simply integrated throughout the day.  In California, we’re required to teach 30 minutes of ELD but few teachers do.

The world’s oldest blogger, Olive Riley of Austrailia, passed away at the age of 108.  Her story is inspiring and her death is painful.  You can read the story here and see her first blog here and her later blog which reports her death and the declining of her illness here.

I frequently get wonderful e-mails from teachers who’ve discovered our class films. They have some questions in them so I decided it was time to answer a couple of them.   If you have questions after reading, please post those questions below as a comment. -Mathew

1. How did you get started?

My Filmmaking Background

I just turned 31 and I’ve been making films since fifth grade. My junior year of high school I made my first feature, a ninety minute tale of unrequited love.

I went to NYU film school for a year but left over fears of spending too much for a degree which might not have career possibilities. I took any tuition money I had left after freshman year and bought a digital video camera and the top of the line Apple G3 and made my movie. (You might say there was a theme to my films).

Video in the Classroom: My Start in the Ed-Biz

I have been a teacher for seven years but have been integrating video in the classroom for twelve years.  I began working in the after school program at Community Magnet School right after high school. There I worked with Martha Melinda who taught me how to direct children and about how they like special effects.

When I had my own classroom, I spent my first two years making sure I knew what I was doing in terms of teaching the curriculum and completing coursework to obtain a teaching credential. I advise new teachers to do the same, make sure you know your curriculum before you start integrating technology. But once I had a credential, I didn’t feel like I had any excuse not to start integrating technology.

How Should I Get Started?

I compiled some links here to tutorials and film tips.  There’s a lot to know but you don’t have to know everything to get started.  Just get started, begin to play and work out your technique as you go.  I recommend the book, Film Directing Shot by Shot for help when you’re ready to start planning your shots and a one-to-one membership at the Apple Store if you’re using the Mac and want software lessons.

How Do You Get Your Audio So Clear?

Proximity is number one rule.  If you record from across the room, you can’t hear, particularly with younger students who talk quietly when they’re nervous.  Get the microphone close and practice projecting before filming.

My microphone cost $300 five years ago. It’s a BeyerDynamic MCE86 shotgun microphone. I also have a microphone stand ($30) which holds in place in a shock mount of sorts. For “Tales from the Yard” students sat right under the microphone as they recorded their voices into Garageband on my iBook. That’s my only secret. Also turn up the volume as loud as you can. Today, there are other microphones that might be much cheaper and give you equally good sound. The cheapest microphone would be better than using the built in mics on your camera or computer.

Links for iMovie ‘08 Bootcamp Class at LACOE.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Apple’s Shortcuts

Macworld article on getting back iMovie ‘06 features

iMovie ‘08 Tutorials

Apple’s Tutorials

Movie Making Tutorials

Flickschool
San Fernando High School Teacher, Marco Torres

Video in the Classroom.com
My site for elementary filmmaking

AFI Screen Education

Storyboarding

Storyboard Template

Storyboarding Movie

Screenplay to Storyboarding Movie

DVDs with Storyboards:

Monsters Inc.
Shrek I

Recommended Reading

Film Directing Shot by Shot by Steve Katz

Copyright and Fair Use

Hall Davidson Chart

Royalty Free Images

http://www.morguefile.com
http://www.pics4learning.com
http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons

Royalty Free Music

Scroll down for list

Web Sites

Zamzar.com for downloading Youtube videos

VersionTracker.com for free and shareware software

VoiceThread
quasi-movie making web site and visual voicemail

Programs Mentioned

PulpMotion
not free but makes cool titles

TubeTV
free program for downloading Youtube movies

Handbrake
free program for getting media off of DVDs

Downloads

Download iMovie’ 06 (if you’ve bought iMovie ‘08 and don’t have it)

Networks

professional networks for teachers

Classroom 2.0 video group

Subscribe to this blog by e-mail

Inspiration

Digital Students/Analog Schools

Ira Glass on Storytelling

SFETT San Fernando Valley Student Film Festival

I’ve seen all the Pixar movies but usually on video.  Finding Nemo was funny and surpassed all my expectations but I’m not sure it was a great film.  Kenneth Turan’s review of Wall-E (coupled with the fact that I’m on vacation and have hours of grad school homework) led me to see Wall-E in the theater and it was fantastic.

Without much dialogue, Pixar managed to create a post-apocalyptic film that’s as powerful as An Inconvenient Truth but for children.  The environmental message and the importance of taking care of our planet are obvious and yet not painted with a saccharin brush by any means.

It’s also a truly moving love story that includes cinematic references to 2001 and Hello Dolly.  Maybe I missed the deeper message of Finding Nemo but I think Wall-E is one of the best films I’ve seen awhile.   I look forward to the Dark Knight.

When it comes to vacation time there are three things I always do:

1. Clean house.
2. Buying stuff.  (This time it’s GPS)
3. Joining another social network.

Over winter break I joined Facebook cuz all my friends were doing it and this time I’m playing around with LinkedIn.  If you’re on there, connect with me.

LinkedIn is like other social networks except this one is more oriented toward business and making connections for jobs and and entrepreneurial endeavors.  I’m having fun looking up people I’ve lost contact with to see what they’re up to now.  It might also be helpful some day in the future.

I also recommend Classroom 2.0 for any educators interested in connecting with other teachers around educational technology.

Kevin shares the ongoing experiences of his clay animation summer camp.

A discussion about software solutions for clay animation continues in Vid Snacks.

And David Kapuler shares an Apple based Leopard friendly clay animation program.

NPR reports on the commercialization of children’s play which has shifted in the second half of the twentieth century from an emphasis on activities towards and emphasis on specific toys and rules.

“(in the first half of the century) [Children] improvised their own play; they regulated their play; they made up their own rules…but in the second half of the 20th century…play changed radically.  instead of spending their time in autonomous shifting make-believe, children were supplied with ever more specific toys for play and predetermined scripts…a trend whih begins to shrink the size of children’s imaginative space.”

The damage is that researches have seen a decrease in children’s self regulation, an ability to “control their emotions, and behavior, resist impulses, and exert self-control and discipline.”

“Today’s 5-year-olds [are] acting at the level of 3-year-olds 60 years ago, and today’s 7-year-olds were barely approaching the level of a 5-year-old 60 years ago.”

I’ve written previously about allowing children to play whenever possible, even integrating that into your Independent Work Time and existing curriculum.  For teachers of the Open Court Reading Program, I beg you to please implement independent work time and to allow that to be a time when students make some of their own choices and begin to self-regulate their own behavior.  It’s a little more chaotic at first but by investing time in training you reap dividends later.  By moving students from center to center based on a rotation, you further take away from students opportunities to make decisions about their own learning.

We all want students to be responsible but do we give them chances to learn responsibilty?  Do we give them changes to exhibit creativity and problem-solving in our classrooms?

Here’s a site that allows you to virtually tour hundreds of factories from ABBA Rubber to Zambelli Fireworks.

Thanks to Kevin for this video.

Angela Maiers presents this slideshow on reading comprehension.  I wish I had attended the actual workshop, however, the slideshow still raises several important points about reading.  My favorite among them is the part about how we offer ridiculous extrinsic incentives for reading that have little to do with fostering a genuine love of reading.  The slideshow also suggests some follow-up activities that lead to more in depth connection to literature.

| View | Upload your own

David Jakes presents this article on generating essential questions for discussion.  Hint:  They’re not yes or no questions.

Larry tagged me to post a little bit more about myself.

1. What was I doing 10 years ago?

I had just turned 21 and was working part time for an afterschool enrichment program while pursuing a job working in film development and completing the editing on my own feature film.

2. What are my 5 things on my to-do list for today (not in any particular order):

Graduate school homework, watching Cramer’s “Mad Money”, cleaning up the house, taking a walk

3. Snacks I enjoy…

pretzels and chocolate chip cookies

4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire:

* Buy a house in west Los Angeles

* Implement a one-to-one laptop program at a school of low-income students.

* Provide food for those who are hungry

5. Three of my bad habits:

Not knowing how to cook, eating too many cookies

6. 5 places I have lived:

Los Angeles, Culver City, New York

7. 5 jobs I have had:

Professional script reader, database manager, guitar teacher, computer tutor

In the past year I’ve become aware of two subscription services marketed at schools, NetTrekker and Renzulli Learning.  Both of which are essentially portals to the internet.  NetTrekker allows teachers to search the internet and get readability information on web sites and Renzulli allows teachers to assess students’ interests and then assist them in finding web sites.  Although they each have something to offer, I can’t help by wonder why we need these services particularly at their high price.  Both of them prey upon a fear of Google and teachers’ ignorance of how to locate and utilize information on the internet.

I thought it was just me but then I came upon Miguel Guhlin’s review of Renzulli Learning which confirms some of my worst fears:

I am disappointed that Renzulli Learning is being touted as a valid tool for differentiation and enrichment. Every non-tech savvy Curriculum & Instruction Gifted and Talented Director/Coordinator is staring with longing at Renzulli Learning…it’s going to save them, integrate technology, and change how teachers teach.

These sites give you a smaller internet which may be less intimidating to some people but it still doesn’t much help with you with what to do with those sites once you get there.  I think it would be much more valuable to teach students (and teachers) how to conduct their own searches and evaluate information that they find.  If you’re really scared of google, try KidsClick.org but if you want to learn to use google better, try the google cheat sheet which explains boolean searching and some hidden google features.

Let’s face it, most teachers don’t read blogs.  If you’re reading this blog by e-mail then this might be the only blog you read.  If you have time for a few more, here are a few I may not have recommended before.  I’m only recommending practical, news you can use blogs.  For my other favorites, see my blogroll.:

Joanne Jacobs
There’s a reason why she’s one of the most popular edublogs.  If you want to be aware of educational news and sound smart in the teacher’s lounge, this may be the only blog you need. Joanne consistently beats all other bloggers in posting current educational events.

Speaker Sue Says
This is frequently updated and offers practical, no nonsense advice on giving presentations.  Please, can every teacher and administrator who gives professional development read this.

Larry Ferlazzo ESL Sites of the Day
I’m not sure how Larry finds all these sites but he finds new sites all the time.  He posts probably 50-100 sites per week bou don’t have to check out all of them.  If you find one good link a week you don’t have to pay for any subscription based services.

I was tagged by Janice Stearns to post a few of my beliefs in education.

I believe…

that technology is not just for the gifted kids.

that all students are gifted, it’s just that some are gifted in ways we haven’t discovered yet.

all students can learn if only we could find a way to teach them.

that parental support is a bonus and the lack of it is not an excuse for not teaching students.

teachers can smile and still maintain “control” of a classroom.

that students rise to your expectations when those expectations are clear.

Welcome to the bi-monthly Digital Storytelling Carnival. Lots of new posts to check out if you haven’t already. Thanks for stopping by.

Classroom Ideas

Caught On Video, Bob Sparnkle suggests several ideas for integrating video production in the curriculum.

Wildlife documentary filmmaking by Scott Floyd.

Split screen inspired by Radiohead by Dan Meyer.

Let Them Remix Videos by @Edu.

Clay Animation

Sir Kevin Hodgson presents several articles on clay animation in the classroom. If you haven’t subscribed to his blog, you may want to:

Behind the Scenes of Stop-Motion
Lego Animation experiments
Creating with Clay
Clay animation in the classroom
PIvot Animation

Practice

Gail Desler explains the importance of storyboarding in digital storytelling.

Tools

The Best Ways for Students to Create Online Videos Using Someone Else’s Content by Larry Ferlazzo and the Best Ways for Students to Create Online Animations.

Converting VoiceThread to video by Kevin Hodgson

Making Youtube Videos a Little Clearer from TeachEng.us

Web-based animation by Wes Fryer.

Digital Storytelling, online moviemaking site.

FlipVideo

Experiments with the Flip by the TechChicks.

An alternative to the flip by Susan Sedro.

Theory

Digital Storytelling as a Disruptive Change Agent by Wesley Fryer.

The Art of Digital Storytelling from TechLearning.

The Power of Digital Storytelling by Alix E Peshette.

100 Helpful Web Tools for Every Kind of Learner by College@Home.

On EduPunkism by Educatorblog.

Reflection

Bonnie Kaplan reflects on her participation in digital storytelling workshop.

Examples

The Piano, teaching film narrative from Clif’s Notes.

Three Cheers for Tacky by Nicole Green, a first grade readers theater production.

Terry Shay’s first animations.

Steve Kimmi’s Storm Stories Voicethread.

NEA Video Project: I Am An Educator

World Domination from the Horizon Project.

Literacy Institute Digital Storytelling by Angelea Maiers using Animoto.

Roll it Gal animation by JakeT.

News

Education Week reports on states’ funding or lack thereof of technology in the classroom.

Contests

AFI’s Hometown Claim to Fame contest.

Opportunities

Apple’s summer camp is free and available to students.

Apple’s downloadable Moviemaking Curriculum.

For units on travel, foreign lands, and journeys, how about having students write a postcard from whatever location you’re studying from the point of view of the people you’re studying. For example, First Grade Journeys and Fifth Grade Going West.

Students can create a postcard, a travel brochure, a postcard, a letter, a mock myspace page with information synthesized from what you’re studying. In terms of higher level thinking I think this gets there better than simple regurgitation of facts, no?

Here’s an online postcard creator

online brochure maker

lesson plans for creating those brochures

Links come by way of Doug Yonce who publishes the best online newsletter you may not be reading.

I’ve recently discovered that there is up to an 18% discount on cell phone service for teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District and other districts. It’s not a very well publicized offer, or at least I had to search and search for it and found out about it through word of mouth, so it’s worth checking to see if you can get the same discount through your district.

Here’s the Verizon site and the AT&T site. I hope this works for you.

They Link Me, They Really Link Me

For the first time, I made it on a list of top Edubloggers, this one by Scott McLeod of Dangerously Irrelevant. The list is based on technorati authority, which for the uninitiated is calculated based on how many blogs link back to your blog.

It’s not an exact science and kind of arbitrary though I’m glad to be included on the list. A fairer way might be to base the list on numbers of readers but those figures are not necessarily public. Several of my favorite blogs (see my blogroll) aren’t on the list with the exception of Larry Ferlazzo who comes in at #13.

Readership on the Rise

Nevertheless, I have noticed my readership increase from 100 readers in December 2007 to 400+ average readers this month so I thought it might be time to offer some advice on what has worked for me.

If You Write It, They Will Come…Not

When Jon Becker, a new-ish blogger, mentioned that being a new blogger felt like being on the outside of an “awesome cocktail party”, he touched a nerve with many bloggers perhaps because we’ve all felt that way in the beginning. A lot of bloggers responded by saying that if a person would just write valuable posts, an audience would show up. While this might have been true in a world with few educational bloggers, I think it’s naive to suggest that just writing good posts will get you noticed when there are hundreds if not thousands of educational bloggers in existence. This is not to say that I haven’t gotten better at blog writing over the past year, it’s just that unless you put yourself out there, people may not show up on their own.

Join the Conversation and Comment

It took me awhile to feel comfortable commenting on other people’s blogs. However, I have discovered some of my favorite bloggers because of comments they’ve left on my own blog. So I’ve come to appreciate that leaving comments is a way to get people to notice your blog. Sometimes it’s not the blog owner who visits your blog as a result of your comment but it can be other commenters who follow the link from your name back to your blog.

Build Relationships

By commenting on blogs and getting comments back, I’ve built some blogging friendships that have both contributed to my teaching practice and been personally rewarding. I never would have “met” Kevin, Alice, Elona, Leila, Gail, Jose, Bonnie—to name just a few, were it not for blogging.

Each of them are bloggers who are about on the same level as me in terms of popularity. It might be more difficult to build a relationship with a top blogger. The top bloggers I’ve spoken to are all nice but they’re busy people. I think friendships are more likely to spring up between bloggers who are on your level because they are more likely to be mutually supportive of your blogging efforts.

Visit a Carnival

A blog carnival, is just a collection of blog posts. I used to think this was gimmicky but the Carnival of Education is like an institution and a generally respected one at that. There are always about 30-40 compiled posts from around the edusphere. There are too many blogs there for me to subscribe to them all (and I wouldn’t want to) but I do like reading a few of the articles every week. I assume other people do the same. They may not want to subscribe to my blog but once in awhile they might be interested in a particular article I’ve written. I have been linked to both from my articles in the Carnival of Education and by visitors to the Carnival of Education who liked a few of my posts, sometimes even stumbled them.

Go Viral

Jon Becker managed to go viral by complaining. My Mr. Winkle movie, while not a pork and beans size youtube hit has been viewed over 8,000 between Youtube and Teachertube and has brought a few visitors to my blog.

While content will not automatically attract an audience, if you don’t have something worth talking about then people will never come and never stay. At the same time, I must say that some of my throwaway posts have been the most popular.

I hope it doesn’t seem like I’m saying that there’s a paint by numbers way of becoming a semi-popular blog. There is no such way. However, these are a few things I’ve done on my blogging journey that have worked for me.

If you know anyone between the ages of 8-12, they’re invited to go for free to a three hour Summer Apple Camp to learn to make movies, music, or take photos. What an awesome opportunity to empower your children at just about any Apple Store for free! I wish I could go.

Pass this on and register here.

An Oregon teacher duct tapes a child to a chair because he couldn’t stop getting up.

Although this is example is obviously extreme, it seems typical of a lot of classroom “discipline” strategies. Similar to a lot pharmaceuticals, we treat the symptom and not the cure. Our problem stops but the cause of the problem never goes away.

How about looking at why a student keeps getting up in class? Could it be, as Garr Reynolds, basing his presentation on Dr. John Medina, suggests, that sitting for long periods of time is unnatural? Why is it we insist on having students sit for long periods even as research suggests that exercise and movement boost cognitive functioning?

How about giving the wandering student a job as a paper monitor, a door monitor, a bathroom break monitor…anything that gives him a chance to get up?

How about employing additional group work if the student gets up because of a need to interact with others?

How about presenting a lesson that engages him enough with what’s at his desk so he wants to stay there…an ant farm, a growing plant, a science experiment, an iPod, a still camera—pick one and I don’t think he’ll wander too far from it.

Tomorrow, members of the Los Angeles teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) will be starting work an hour late to protest proposed state budget cuts to education. With education funding tied largely to property values in California, the situation is likely to get worse before it gets better. On the table, if not today then in the near future, is the firing of probationary teachers, increases in class sizes, and cuts to teacher salaries.

For elementary teachers participating in the job action and wondering how to explain what they are doing to their students, I recommend the book, Click, Clack, Moo, Cows That Type in which the cows go on strike to protest poor working conditions from the farmer. I’ve used this as an introduction to Ceser Chavez and Martin Luther King and to explain previous job actions by teachers.

Whether teachers are right or wrong, the lesson for students can be that sometimes it’s important to peacefully stand up for what you believe in.

Now that testing is over, I’m being asked a lot if I know of any games that students can play on the computer.

Let’s be clear, I like games as much as the next guy (here and some for language arts and here some for math) but I wish that we could shift our thinking to ask if we know of anything students can create on the computer. With programs like Garageband, iMovie and Voicethread, students can be planning and creating projects that are probably just as much fun and equally easy to use now that they’re built in on most computers.

Games, educational or not, aren’t the only things computers do these days. In case you’ve missed it, there are many ways to promote higher level thinking on the computer and empower students to create.

If you haven’t done this yet this year, start now but next year let’s work it in before testing too, students might test better if given an opportunity to design and create instead of just pushing buttons.

Mr. Pullen wonders if smaller class sizes lead to greater student achievement as his superintendent decides the research suggests it doesn’t.

It makes sense that if a teacher lectures all day that it’s not going to make a big difference whether the teacher has 20 students, 24, or 32.  However, if a teacher meets with small groups, has student conferences, and individually supports groups then having a few less students can make a difference.

Perhaps a lot of research on smaller class sizes is inaccurate because teachers might have smaller class sizes without changing the way they teach.  I don’t think that smaller class sizes in themselves necessarily make for better teaching, they just make life easier for a teacher.

What research have you encountered on the subject?

The strategies we use with our reading program are:

Asking Questions
Clarifying
Predicting
Visualizing
Summarizing
Making Connections

Download Reading Strategy Posters

Nevertheless, in most classrooms students understand predicting and that’s about it. Or students can clarify when the teacher says, “Clarify” but they’ll rarely choose to use the strategy of clarifying on their own.

Where Are We Going Wrong?

1. We need to make sure that we are explicitly modeling how to use the strategy, naming it, defining it, and then using it.

2. We need to make sure students understand why we use a particular strategy. What I’ve noticed when coaching teachers and having my own lessons observed, is that what we forget is to explain why we use a strategy. So, for example, when we summarize we explain that summarizing is retelling what’s happened, we often forget to mention that good readers summarize to check for understanding and make sure we remember what we’ve read.

3. We need to give students opportunities to explicitly use strategies and remember to prompt them not just for the name of the strategy, but also for a reason why they are using it.

*Here’s an interesting post linking blog comments to the reading strategies by Gail “Blogwalker” Desler.

Explicit teaching of comprehension strategies is a part of both currently approved reading series in California and will likely be a part of whatever new program is adopted. I speak for myself, an English major, when I say that I initially found the teaching of strategies to be silly. I mean, I just read stuff and I understand it. No one taught me how to use strategies and I turned out okay.

However, what I think we forget is that as adults we forget that we’ve already developed our own strategies and internalized them or we haven’t and we try to avoid those activities which we haven’t developed strategies for. Many of our students will develop their own strategies over time. However, working with large populations of English Language Learners and students who do not have much support at home in learning to read, having strategies to help comprehend is particularly important.

And there is research to support the teaching of strategies.

See Part Two:  Comprehension Strategies, Where Are We Going Wrong?

Here’s an interesting page which gathers literacy movies, blogs, lessons, etc that are contained on Google’s Pages: http://www.google.com/literacy/

It also asks you to share what you are doing.

I’ve had some time now to reflect on my blog’s discussion about differentiation that brought about some pretty exciting comments, particularly on this post about classroom management which now has 40 comments, most of them about differentiation even though that wasn’t what the post was about.

Tracking vs. Differentiation is the Wrong Argument

I think the discussion was framed incorrectly by people who viewed the conversation as one about tracking vs. differentiation. I understand that the argument was framed as such if you followed certain links in but I reject the idea that tracking means you won’t have to differentiate because even then the students have different talents and skills. I’m also not about discussing whether heterogenous groupings of students is better or not better. The fact is that most classes are put together with mixed ability groupings and I’m about how to make that work. Arguments for or against differentiation have their place but this isn’t it.

We Have to Accept Mediocrity/Every Teacher Can’t Be a Superstar

No we don’t/not every teacher has to be.

These were a couple of the comments I received. If you haven’t heard me when I say that differentiation through methods like writer’s workshop and student research are not more work for a teacher than traditional worksheets then I haven’t done what I set out to do.

I do not consider myself a superstar and I’m not one of those teachers who stays at school until six o’clock at night every day cleaning my closets. Many teachers put in a lot of time and it doesn’t necessarily translate into better teaching. I like teaching methods that require little preparation but involve small tweaks that make huge differences in student learning…like having students pair share information, employing visuals for presentation, allowing students to choose topics of interest to them. None of these things take more of my personal time and they each have paid big dividends for me. Try them out.

English Language Learners Don’t Read My Blog

I sympathize with the gifted parents who read and commented on my blog posts. In the interest of full-disclosure I was identified as gifted in the second grade and although I was placed in regular classrooms I participated in a pull-out GATE program. Those who commented that gifted students need to be challenged and engaged are preaching to the choir if they’re talking to me.

However, the voices of parents of English Language Learners I teach are apparently not represented in the comments. I reject the idea that gifted students are the only ones who are bored in class. I think everyone needs better (read more engaging and relevant teaching that promotes higher level thinking). The idea that your lowest students can’t participate in writing and research on their current academic level is hogwash.

Teacher Used to Do It All the Time

My favorite comment received is from Carolyn who said:

Teachers used to differentiate instruction all the time–this was what happened in one room school houses, with eight grades. All kids learned to work independently and all kids’ needs could be addressed since there were eight levels of material at any given moment.

While one-room schoolhouses had a lot of problems, I do get tired of whining about how hard it is to have students of different talents in the same room.

I don’t see engaging students of different levels as an option, I think that’s what teaching is.

Sign up for Workshops Here

The summer technology workshop schedule at the Los Angeles County Office of Education has been announced and I’m on it.

I’ll be offering the Integrating Technology in the Open Court Reading Program that I’ve been doing for the past year in various forms.

However, I’m also offering two new courses, iMovie ‘08 Bootcamp and Final Cut Express bootcamp. These classes are a a mixture of the technical and the artistic. You’ll come away able to use the software programs but also with a sense of shot composition, pacing, and the cinema techniques. I’ll teach you everything I learned before dropping out of NYU film school and from my experience as an independent (many films for no money) filmmaker.

There’s one more class too, a one day workshop on iWork ‘08.

For those who’ve never taken my classes before, know that they’re always for beginners and advanced users alike. For those who have taken my classes before, come back, the news ones are going to be cool and I particularly enjoy having repeat visitors.

If you’re in the Los Angeles area, Downey sounds far but it’s not. It’s one of my favorite places to teach because the participants are awesome, the technology always works, and Cathy Rodriguez rocks.

Sign up for Workshops Here

True to form, my grandmother wanted the last word. I have been cleaning up her apartment and found this note right inside her dresser addressed to me and dated from 1997. I don’t know how I didn’t see it before but I just found it and it warmed my heart.

Dear Mathew,

I want to leave you with my wish for you. I can’t express myself as I would like to.

My thoughts are that you will fill your life with wonderful words, beautiful music, warm, kind, helpful ways to help others. This I know you are cpable of. Embrace all that life has to offer. Be good to yourself and to others.

Always remember how much I love you,
Mimi

Freda Needleman
1911-2008

Please forgive me as I’m taking a week off from educational blogging this week to remember one of my greatest teachers, my grandmother, who I called Mimi. She died this week, just thirteen days shy of her ninety-seventh birthday in her own apartment which she had lived in for over thirty years. We had an unusually close relationship. We spoke every day and visited once or twice a week. My father, her only child, died when I was a year old and so whereas other people had a mother and father, I had a mother and grandmother. This has meant that I’ve always sucked at sports but it has also meant that I have had two incredible teachers who have loved and supported me and taught me everything I know.

My grandmother didn’t want someone who didn’t know her to get up and speak about her and so my mother and I spoke at her funeral. I felt unable to speak in person and so no one was surprised hat I delivered my speech and accompanying slideshow via DVD. Here’s my speech…

I recently spoke at an educational conference in Palm Springs and Mimi listened as I practiced my speech. She gave me two pieces of advice. She said, talk loud and don’t touch yourself. Today’s a little harder than that conference so please forgive me if I forget one of her suggestions.

It was twelve o’clock midnight, just before my grandmother was going into hip surgery. She sent everyone else out of the room and called me close. I was crying. And she said, if something happens to me I don’t want you to cry and I don’t want you to be sad because what we had was special and you I have had some good times together. And we both said I love you.

And she came out of hip surgery and lived for six more years. She kept falling down, sometimes literally, and springing back to life, each time with more pains and bruises but each time alive. So it’s not a surprise now that she’s gone but on some level it seemed as if she was going to go one forever.
Ever since picking me up from kindergarten she was always teaching me lessons. She was always afraid that I wasn’t listening or that she hadn’t gotten through to me and so I guess what I want her to know is that I was listening and her voice has been guiding me in my head for years and that won’t go away any time soon.

She taught me to treat others how I wanted to be treated, how to make meatballs, and in second grade she taught me not to eat my own boogers. On one of our weekly trips to the market last year we were walking past the melons when suddenly she got all choked up and I said, “What’s wrong?” And she said, “I must have done something right. I must’ve taught you something because you’ve turned out okay. “ And I was feeling pretty good about my life choices and how often do you hear this so I prompted her a little, I said, “What makes you say that?” And she said, “Back there with the bread, you knew those rolls were bad. You wouldn’t buy stale bread.”

And another favorite memory at the market. We had just paid and I was pushing the cart. She was pushing the walker. We left the checkstand and we were walking behind an old man also using a walker. We walked slowly and politely behind him for about five feet and then I looked at my grandmother. She was walking so quickly herself but she shook her head and said, “Oh, come on!” and she pulled her walker out from behind him and pushed herself out the door in front of him.

And so I’m sad that she didn’t get to see me buy a house which might be happening soon. And she didn’t get to meet her great grandkids which won’t be happening soon. And she didn’t get to go to her funeral which so far is pretty nice.

But she was there and she was always there for everything from baseball games to birthdays and graduations, movie premieres, and play premieres. She came to school with me to help out one day when I was teaching kindergarten. And I think she was proud of my teaching. She kept print-outs of articles I’d written for my blog on her coffee table. She was very interested in my internet business and she even asked me about the day before she died. A couple of years ago she had seen a Dateline NBC program or something like it about pornography on the internet. She was very concerned that I was involved with something shady and couldn’t understand why random people were sending me money. So I tried to explain to her for an hour about how the business worked and at the end I said my business has absolutely nothing to do with pornography. Okay, she said I understand…but wouldn’t you make more money if it did?

And so she was right, what he had was something special and I am lucky to have had thirty one years with Mimi. My life has been better because of it. I love her and I will never will forget her lessons or her love.

I leave this message for [my father and grandmother also buried at the same cemetery] to say that I loved her, I took care of her the best I could, and I give her to you now. You take care of her, make her laugh, and bring her by the house, we live just down the street.

Learning A-Z is offering free resources this week. I’m not a big fan of worksheets but they’re not all worksheets. Today they have free downloadable books. You will need to log-in and create an account.

May 05
http://www.readinga-z.com
Thousands of printable books, including leveled readers and supporting materials

May 06
http://www.raz-kids.com
Interactive leveled reading library and online progress management system

May 07
http://www.writinga-z.com
The most complete collection of elementary writing resources anywhere

May 08
http://www.vocabularya-z.com
Custom vocabulary lessons and activities to match thousands of topics

May 09
http://www.reading-tutors.com
Skill-specific materials for students needing extra reading help

May 12
NEW: http://www.sciencea-z.com
Science units with multi-level books, lessons, experiments, and labs