I try to participate in a regular Google+ hangout.  We discuss .. our work looks like, what we want our work to look like, important current events, etc.  If you have not participated in a Google+ hangout you should try it.  Find a teacher who you is interesting to talk to, necessary to collaborate with, or just willing to play and try it out.  They must use Google products and have a camera on their computer and the desire to join you in an online conversation.

Our hangout had more than 20 people coming in and out of the room so between that interference and the streaming problems that might be present take this embedded example as just a way to see what you can do.  Google hangout has a chat room so that if there are several people online together some people could be chatting as some people are talking.

This hangout was done with the following people:

Some of them I wanted to hangout with and some them just dropped in and then out again.

This hangout was scheduled as a book talk with:

+Paul Allison +monika hardy and +Chris Sloanare joined by +Howard Rheingold +Fred Mindlin +Valerie Burton+Mariana Rios +christian romero and Jeff Lebow

Our goal was to discuss NetSmart  by Howard Rheingold.

Well guess what? The adoption of the Common Core Standards is here, kind of.  Common Core State Standards  (www.corestandards.org.)  There are some changes that will be made within the next few years that will modify our current GLEs so that they are better aligned to the Common Core Standards.  Here is some of the work that has been done in Louisiana:  Louisiana’s Common Core Standards Implementation Plan.

I am focusing on the changes to 9th grade English but here are some tips to help make the transition easier as I spend the summer reading and planning how to best serve my students (and making sure that I have acceptable value added scores…)

These screenshots from the Grade-Level Content Comparison Reports show what the changes mean on to our existing documents:

]]> http://2blog2share2learn.edublogs.org/2012/05/05/meshing-our-curriculum-with-common-core/feed/ 0 http://2blog2share2learn.edublogs.org/2012/05/05/studenttweeting/ http://2blog2share2learn.edublogs.org/2012/05/05/studenttweeting/#comments Sun, 06 May 2012 00:23:17 +0000 Ms. B. http://2blog2share2learn.edublogs.org/?p=2348 More >]]> Last week I asked my class to create Tweets regarding the story that we were reading in class, Pretty Ugly by Paul  .  Here is a screenshot of Tweets from my class Twitter account.

I captured their tweets using Tweetdoc.  It created PDFs of the Twitter hashtags that I asked them to use.  Here is a graphic that I created from a PDF.

How successful was this activity???

 I know that they focused on the plot elements more doing these updates than they just reading and listening to the story.  I gave them class participation points for each update they created.  Could I have required them to take down some notes in a reading log?  Yes, buuuutttt I am thinking about doing this more often.  I will have them to quickly plan out their tweets on paper and then have them post them online.

Hashtags to use

• #BS121 – General class update information
• #Plot121 – Updates and remarks about plot elements from readings
• #Voc121 – Updates about use of interesting vocabulary words from our readings
• #Ref121 – Updates about thoughts and feelings evoked by our readings

In this day and age, most of us will agree that we do our students an injustice if we are not training them to latch on to an issue that compels them to seek out the answers to their own questions.  Testing now not only requires them to supply the right answer, it also requires them to provide a response to a question that will have different answers for different students.  We must be able to teach them that their answer is the right one if they can back it with details and examples.

How do we do this?  How do we get them to tap into themselves and pull out .. an answer or even another question?

That is the problem that I always seem to be faced with.  Many times I will throw out a question and then listen as the crickets sing and wait for an answer, any answer.  I will wait for it … wait for it…. wait for it…. waaaaaaait for it….  Many times I give in to the silence and rephrase the question and then begin the process again. Wait for it … wait for it … and bam!!! A student speaks.  He is not really sure that he has has the answer that I am looking for but because he wants to put me out of my misery will volunteer a response that is not quite what I am looking for but is good enough for me to solicit other questions and/or comments to continue our discussion.

It is difficult to be able to relinquish the control that we have on knowing it all and allow students to figure their way around the material and find the answers to their own questions. I think that we are training ourselves as we train them.  I actually have to count out wait time because I want to take them out of the hotseat as I see them squirm.  But squirming is okay because I am asking them to do something that is new and uncomfortable for them.

I like the question starters on this site because they give me lots of choices.  As I train them to think for themselves, I need choices and help as I train myself ways to help them to think.  The site lists categories that will give you examples of good question/conversation starters.

• Positive Questions: Deliberately leading the other person.
• Probing: Digging for more detail.
• Probing Questions: Specific questions for finding detail.
• Rhetorical Questions: Questions without answers.
• Socratic Questioning: Socrates’ method of questioning in order to elicit learning.
• Tag Questions: Some questions encourage agreement, don’t they?

Al worked on it for 2 days during class as well as before and after my class.  It was coming along when a tech glitch in MovieMaker wiped out all of the hard work that he had done.  I was more than willing to give him credit for the assignment because I saw how hard he worked on his project.  He did not want me to do that, instead, he re-did the assignment and spent day and night for the next 2 days finishing and perfecting what he had done.

His final project brought me to tears and still does even as I write about it four years later.  I provided them with some pictures of the devastation done to the city after the levees broke and he decided not to use the ones that I provided but instead chose extremely graphic ones that showed the Hurricane Katrina devastation that he had witnessed and experienced.  He chose Michael Jackson’s Man in the Mirror as the background music for his movie and the song played long after his movie ended but we all sat there – glued to the screen, watching … nothing.  My class and I were all speechless by the depth of emotion that Al had shown us in his movie.  It was filled with typos and some of the slides had gotten out of order but it was brilliant.  We all recognized that he had put more of himself into this assignment than he had ever done for anything else that he completed in our class.  I have since lost the movie but it will never be forgotten and it is his work that fuels all that I do in class.

Al showed me that for him technology gave him the tools that he needed to express himself in ways that he had not been able to do before.  He convinced me of the necessity of allowing this creative freedom for my students and I have not looked back since.

This post is inspired by Shelly Terrell’s Goal 2 Highlight Your Magical Teaching Moment of the 30 Goal Challenge.

For me that is easy – technology integration and the publication of student work.  I want my kids to publish photomovies, blog posts, fake tweets/facebook pages and essays on their ePortfolios.  It is my experience that I can engage the ‘unengageable’ more with technology than I could with pen and paper.

Here are some of the ePortfolios that my students have published.  Some are better than others BUT I am pleased with them all.  The students rose to the challenge and completed more work for me on their ePortfolios than they did completing worksheets.

Sarah’s work

Myesha’s work

Sheldon’s work

I have had the pleasure of scheduling Wednesday nights to work with Paul Allison, Youthvoices.net, and others in a discussion about Howard Rheingold‘s book, http://www.rheingold.com/netsmart, in a Google+ hangout.

Paul has organized a book group on Teachers Teaching Teachers http://edtechtalk.com  and they meet Wednesdays at 9:00 PM Eastern.  Next Wednesday, April 25th, will be our second Wednesday discussing Rheingold’s book.

Here are links for the index, table of contents and the first chapter.

I will be posting my thoughts on some of the chapters from the book in the next few days.

Here is a screenshot of a blogpost created by one of my students.  This assignment is from our from Romeo and Juliet Unit: she is Juliet’s mother after Juliet is found dead.

Thanks to Shelly Terrell and her Teacher Reboot Camp Goal Challenge for the idea behind this post: Goal #8: Share an Activity

Isn’t that the problem that has been plaguing teachers for ages: how do we get the kids to want to do and share the work?

I have integrated technology into my classes as a way of introducing them to novel publication methods that I hope will motivate them to complete assignments.  Does it work? Yes with some and No with others. Just like with pen and paper. Go figure.

What I decided to do is to have them create posts that re-cap their online postings from the week from Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, etc. I will give them parameters because I don’t need them to re-post inappropriate posts but I do what them to take stock of what they publish.  I hope that once they begin to look at and summarize the information that they share regularly, they will feel compelled to clean up their digital footsteps and publish work that they will not be embarrassed to re-post.

Here is my cleaned up (cleaned up because I took out my many postings to Foursquare about where I went and what I did) work from this week from Twitter, Facebook and Google+

Daily Twitter Newspaper

• was released – The Ms. B. is Online Daily is out! http://paper.li/MsBisOnline

• The greatest wealth is to live content with little. ~ Plato
• “The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind – Wayne Dyer”
• “Are You In Hiding? Or Shining Brightly?” @AmazingWomen
• “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams ~ Eleanor Roosevelt”
• “The world makes way for the man who knows where he is going.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Words Of Wisdom from Maya Angelou http://ow.ly/6CAlN via@AmazingWomen
• Action=Results=Success=Confidence=Action via @motivationlive
• When it comes down to it, the last person you think of at night is the one who truly matters to you.
• As my own children get older and begin to see the world differently, the more important it is for me to teach LOVE and UNDERSTANDING.

Must Read Articles or Must Watch Videos

• “Use of #childsoldiers can be eradicated, says UN envoy working to protect rights of children in conflict http://j.mp/HdNzpR” via @UN
• Change a mood, mind, heart 2day w/these 2 words by@angelamaiers http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FHdHUzRnms#YouMatter
• Teachers and Students As Media Producers | MindShift http://bit.ly/HjwHBz
• Ten Tips for Personalized Learning via Technology   http://www.edutopia.org/stw-differentiated-instruction-ten-key-lessons#.T36XeN8nkxw.twitter
• Digital Differentiation http://d97cooltools.blogspot.fr/2012/02/digital-differentiation-get-wired.html

Kudos

• DEN Summer Institute 2012 – DEN Blog Network http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/blog/2012/04/05/den-summer-institute-2012-2/ I am going!!! How about you?