Digital Board

Glog on Diversity in our Classroom

Glogster is an excellent web 2.0 tool to grow my students’ ethical and respectful minds by allowing students to collaborate online with others.  They can share information, view information and create. Gardner says, “The task for educators becomes clear: if we are to fashion persons who respect differences, we need to provide models and offer lessons that encourage such a sympathetic stance”. Glogster allows me to create such a lesson and/or unit to get students thinking and working in a respectful and sympathetic way.  Glogster is versatile enough to be used with any subject or topic and allows students the opportunity to explore, respond, create and apply what their learning through links and embedded videos, charts, photos and other media.

The Glogster that I created was developed with my students and their families input.  I was able to talk with my students and their families and find out where they are from and a little about their culture. Then we put together the Glog based on their input. I will use this Glog over several weeks to give students the opportunity to share their geographical backgrounds and to compare and contrast their differences.  Then students will have a chance to reflect and write about the importance of learning about their similarities and differences.  After working through the Glog together I will give students an opportunity to explore the links, videos and activities in centers.  Then we will celebrate by having a day of diversity where students can bring in a family member, food, clothing and media to share their culture with the class.  I could have them work with their families to create a Glog with personal photos, videos and links to teach each other about their culture to share on this day. Using Glogster in whole group will afford students the opportunity to showcase their background and show and tell their culture.  This board gives us a jumping off point to learn to appreciate our diverse world and to accept each other.  In addition, it will give them a safe environment to explore their bias and prejudices and discover the truths in each culture. I will be modeling the ethical and respectful minds as I acknowledge and help students explore the languages, culture, beliefs and traditions among each other.

Gardner, H. (2007). Five Minds for the Future. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Video Blog Developing Gardner's Five Minds

The five minds Gardner addresses have justified and polished my philosophy of teaching.  I have always been pushing the envelope and trying to offer my students independence and opportunity to grow and learn through doing and creating.  Debbie Diller and the Two Sisters have been my examples as I try to create this type of learning environment for my students.  Howard Gardner will be added to my references as I continue to prepare my students for the 21st century skills set and knowledge they will need to be successful in our global world.

Gardner, H. (2007). Five Minds for the Future. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

Unit 6: Respectful and Ethical Minds

There are several ways that I allow my students to collaborate online.  One that I have used for two years now is Kidblog.org. I have implemented the use of student comments in Kidblog to teach online etiquette.  I did this by modeling, modeling, modeling and role playing and assessing comments over a period of weeks to help students understand appropriate and helpful comments as opposed to feel good or hurtful comments.  We discussed in length magic words that should always be in comments and ways of wording suggestions that make their classmate feel supported and help them to learn.  For instance when giving a push students can say, "You can make your writing even better by...". The students connect with other classrooms in our building through Kidblog as well.  My students can share ideas with others through commenting on their posts and vice versa.    

Another more recent discovery I have made is ePals Global Community.  I signed up for a project with Macedonia to collaborate on solving a global problem with another 2nd grade class and I put a project out called Mystery Skype, that allows my classroom to collaborate with another second grade classroom in a mystery location (hopefully in South America).  The two classes will have to create questions and research their own answers. Then they will ask the questions over a Skype call to find out where the other classroom is located.  In addition, we will be creating a Prezi presentation with our ePal to showcase our locations. This will support collaboration among students and allow students to practice being respectful and using ethics.  

All of these activities support respectful and ethical minds because it lets students have the opportunity to work with diverse students and consider different perspectives. As noted in the interview with Vicky Davis and Julie Lindsey, this will also help students understand that "they are not the center of the universe" and that other countries in the world have different schedules, holidays, time zones, ways of life and priorities.  The more we expose students to these experiences the more we can instill in them respect and ethics.  Students need real world exposure in order to learn this type of thinking and acting.  It is not something that can be taught in isolation.  


Works Cited:

Juliani, AJ. (2013, March 11). Flattening classrooms and engaging minds with global education: an interview with vickie davis and julie lindsay. [Video file]. Retrieved from  http://educationismylife.com/flattening-classrooms-and-engaging-minds-with-global-education-an-interview-with-vicki-davis-and-julie-lindsay/

Unit 5: Spotlight on Strategies Reflection and Link

What instructional goal/challenge does your SOS address? 

Geocaching is a form of collaborative and active learning that addresses many challenges.  The most critical of these being student motivation and engagement.  While geocaching, students are problem solving, cooperating, using map skills and technical skills while actively engaged.  Students must work together and focus to complete the tasks.  This gets them talking and listening to each other's ideas to create their own understanding.  Students are motivated because they are using technology to accomplish the tasks and they have specific tasks to complete.  This strategy supports what the Center for Teaching and Learning has to say about student engagement, "Research has demonstrated that engaging students in the learning process increases their attention and focus, motivates them to practice higher-level critical thinking skills, and promotes meaningful learning experiences." 


What additional value does the integration of digital media bring to your idea in terms of students’ understanding of the concept or topic?

Digital integration helps students understand the concept by motivating them, engaging their senses and minds and in this example getting their bodies moving.  The old saying 'hands on, minds on' can easily apply to using digital media in the classroom. This is an excellent way to strengthen 21st century skills while actively engaging them in content.  Students are more likely to learn the material because they are actively engaged and motivated by the GPS devices and the iPad clues and videos.  Without these tools students may be active but not as engaged.  According to a case study conducted by SRI International, "students were able to handle more complex assignments and do more with higher-order skills because of the supports and capabilities provided by technology." In addition, they go on to say that the use of technology for an assignment is highly motivating to students and it builds self confidence.  If students feel confident and motivated they are more likely to take risks, make mistakes and learn from them. More over technology is valued in our society, they see their parents using it for work and their teachers using it for instruction, giving them technology makes them feel powerful and connects them with the real world way of doing things.

Here is the link to my Spotlight on Strategies Smore flyer.

https://www.smore.com/ccse




Bibliography:

faust, J. & Paulson, D. (2013). Active learning for the college classroom. 20 November 2013. Retrieved from http://www.calstatela.edu/dept/chem/chem2/Active/

Hall, T. & Strangman, N. (2009). Background knowledge. Retrieved from
http://aim.cast.org/learn/historyarchive/backgroundpapers/background_knowledge#.Uotv9MSkrgo

Engaging students in learning. Center for teaching and learning. University of washington. Retrieved 20 November 2013, from http://www.washington.edu/teaching/teaching-resources/engaging-students-in-learning/

SRI International; technology and education reform. Effects of technology on classrooms and students. Retrieved 20 November 2013 from http://www2.ed.gov/pubs/EdReformStudies/EdTech/effectsstudents.html

Unit 5: Creativity in the Classroom

I decided to put out a survey to my second graders in regards to what apps they would like to do to be creative in class.  The majority showed interest in creating videos using animoto.  We will be creating short videos in small groups to reteach a concept learned in class.  Last year my students made a how to video on calendar math, another group did a spotlight on an author and another group taught us about verbs.  After the videos were scripted, filmed and edited we shared them with our families and the class.  The whole class voted on creating posters in piccollage.  The students can create posters to demonstrate their understanding of a concept or to activate prior knowledge by doing a word splash.  They can also create posters to introduce themselves to each other.  The next item they were all excited about doing is making digital postcards to write friendly letters and share with their families concepts we are learning in class using the app photocard.  These can be e-mailed to the parents instantly and the students can add their own photographs or pictures.  The last project the whole class voted on was creating postcards from punctuation marks.  The students take on the role of a punctuation mark and use story buddy to create an image showing the punctuation mark on vacation somewhere.  Then they write a letter to our class explaining where they are, what they are doing and why it is important that they come back to our class soon.  These are then printed and displayed in the classroom.

When I asked the class what technology they like that we are using in the classroom now to be creative they said that they enjoyed using the netbooks to write on kidblog and using the smartboard to watch videos clips about a topic, learning through Prezi presentations like the one on book genres, listen to songs to learn a concept and playing games.  They also enjoy using manipulatives like base ten blocks on the smartboard to work through math problems because it is easy and fun.

The things they like about the iPads now are magnet letters to practice their spelling patterns, storypatch and scribble press for making books, puppet pals where they can retell the story using puppets of the characters and settings from their book, and voicethread where they take a picture of the book they are reading and then do a verbal book review and read their favorite part.

Unit 4: Creativity

First of all, I have to say that this Ted Talk was fantastic.  The way Sir Ken Robinson explains things is so on point and logical.  My favorite quote was "creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status."  

So now considering the question; do I think schools kill creativity? Yes, in many ways schools are forced to teach students with an emphasis on left brain thinking. We expect them to learn to read and write and do arithmetic in a uniform and neat way and then demonstrate what they've learned by performing on tests. Students are asked to sit and work for hours on end and when they do not sit still and follow status quo we request testing and have them medicated. Education is in many ways designed in a box and if students do not fit in that box they are typically unsuccessful and leave feeling that they are not good enough, smart enough, perfect enough, etc. I have seen this personally and professionally with students over many years and it is heartbreaking to watch.  Several of these students dropped out because they were so at odds with their environment it was too much to take.  People can only handle so many failing grades before they feel like throwing in the towel and walking away. To many of these students school seems pointless. They can either change who they are and how they learn or leave.  We should and can offer these students another choice; a better choice, by bringing more of what plays to their strengths into the forefront.  

We need to start taking into account that our world is changing, that degrees aren't the only way to be successful, that creativity and 21st century skills are vital and innovation is what is driving our society at the moment. Digital media, while not the be all end all of our solutions to creativity in education, certainly can ignite creativity in our students.  Project-based learning is one way students can use technology to create.  Digital storytelling for example is a powerful way for students to share experiences, research, history and more.  Apps like Puppet Pals makes retelling stories fun and interactive allowing students to be creative as they practice and learn comprehension skills.  Online learning contracts utilizing a variety of web tools to explore topics that are motivating and interesting to individual students help foster creativity. In a simpler way media can be used to offer students brain breaks giving their bodies a chance to move and increase circulation. Online videos played on the Smartboard with simple dance moves reenergize students and challenge their gross motor skills. My class loves to do the Gummy Bears Song and the Sid Shuffle as they transition to the next subject. The app PicCollage allows my students to arrange timelines, word splashes, character traits, sequencing events and dozens of other topics in interesting and creative ways.  

Just this week my class used the new app colar mix to bring their illustrations to life and write stories about them.  If you want to get kids imaginations going this is the app.  Their illustration come off the page and are animated.  I took pictures of the students holding their illustrations in their hands.  The stories that came from this were full of wonder and adventure and still met all the requirements of a narrative fiction writing piece according to the common core standards.

If we as teachers can think and live outside the box while still meeting the standards and other pressures put on us, we can reach and nurture our students' innate creativity and talents.  Media is a great place to begin this process. 

Unit 3: Prezi Presentation

Media-infused presentations, like the Prezi I created, can help in developing disciplined and synthesizing minds in many ways.  First according to Topic B in Unit 3, there are nuances that make content from a video, a song, a lecture, a text or a podcast more or less meaningful for different learning styles. My prezi contains many examples of video, podcast, images and text that help students gather information and bring it together in order to make sense of book genres.  Offering students several different ways of accessing information and organizing it into a presentation helps them to connect with the information in different ways and allows them to develop ideas to discuss in small groups and with the whole class.  With the vast amount of content available online students will benefit from having it narrowed down and packaged neatly into a engaging presentation. This will help them focus in on the content being taught in easy to digest bits. Through these learning opportunities each student's unique learning style will be addressed and they will begin to synthesize the information by bringing it all together in a way that makes sense to them.  Media makes it easier than ever to reach all of our student's learning styles at once and create rich discussions in order to begin to build understanding.

In addition to creating whole group learning opportunities, these presentations can be used in centers to reinforce and assess students' understanding.  Projects, reflection papers and many other assignments can be linked within the presentation to have students further demonstrate their thought process and mastery of the content.  As noted in Topic C of unit 3, we need to understand that evaluating and assessing synthesis is not typically something that can be measured in a traditional form. Therefore, I would have my students work in triads using PicCollage to gather or take photos of examples of a particular genre and add text supporting why these examples qualify. Then they could present these posters to the class and discuss their work with the class to gain other perspectives.  As a culminating activity, I could also have them create a guide book, video or podcast that could be used to help us determine the genres of books we read a-loud in class.  They could accomplish this by using StoryPatch, StoryBuddy, iMovie or VoiceThread to explain the attributes of each genre they learned.  This would give me a formal assessment piece from which to judge each student's ability to synthesize the information presented.  

Below is the link to my presentation which is being used in whole group instruction and centers to reinforce the concepts taught.

Prezi Presentation

Works Cited:

Topic B: digital synthesis. Wilkes University. Web. 13 November 2013

Topic C: assessing synthesis. Wilkes University. Web. 13 November 2013

Unit 3: Synthesizing Mind

This eduClipper Board will be used for the soils unit that I teach my second grade students.  It contains videos, interactive websites that they can explore to answer questions they have about soils, songs that teach about soils and an infographic showing how to build a compost pile.  We will use all of the online tools in class to enrich and support our lessons.  As a side note, I am sharing this website with my team, I love it!


Educlipper Board on Soils

Unit 2: Blog on Digital Media

This writing prompt would be used as part of our South America Landforms unit.  Students will write a least 5 sentences telling what happens during the rest of our adventure in the rainforest.  They would have to use some of the vocabulary we learned in this unit to describe the setting and what the characters see and do.

Unit 1: Introduction Tweet

          JenniferBarcavage

            @JenniferBarcavage

Second Grade Teacher and Digital Immigrant. Looking forward to engaging digital natives in core content through 

digital media. Innovative Leader and Learner.

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Reflecting on Inquiry Based Classrooms

   First of all I can't believe this is my last blog for Inquiry Based Learning.  While this class wasn't a cinch it did fly by faster than I imagined it would.  When I think back to my impressions of inquiry upon starting this class, I realize there were so many things I thought I knew but now have a better understanding of.

   I love the quote that started us off:
           
               "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire." -William Butler Yeats.

  I couldn't agree with this more, and lighting the fire is what this course was all about.  Finding ways to engage students and help them take ownership of their own learning is our greatest task as educators.  Students need to feel that burning curiosity for life and then know how to pursue it and find success.  As I believed in the beginning, we are facilitators and coaches on the side helping students make connections and build on their beliefs.  As we have seen, the most impactful way we can teach students is by activating their minds, accessing their beliefs and leading them to discovering connections.  The days of traditional lecturing and essentially feeding students information is giving way to providing students with a focus, the appropriate tools and skill set to allow them to formulating ideas, make connections and draw conclusions.

   This was illustrated so impressively in the video we watched with the high school science teacher.  When I read the title, the physics of optics, I thought what language are they speaking and how could this ever apply to my second graders.  I was amazed by how relevant and applicable this lesson was to my classroom.  You could literally see the students lighting up throughout the lessons as they played with ideas and collaborated with their peers to make new connections with the material.  It was so clear through this teacher how inquiry based instruction is extremely structured and yet flexible along its path.  In this environment planning and structure are even more crucial than in traditional teaching.  You have to be ready to take turns and back up and accelerate at any given moment because the students are leading their learning.  All the while you are keeping them focused on the overarching concept and justifying your movements.  It almost seems too complex to pull off but at the same time it is simply student engagement and discovery.  I feel more justified in my "unpopular" approach to teaching through this course.  The theorist, such as William Glasser, Debbie Diller and The Two Sisters, that I have admired and connected to my classroom environment are all believers of lighting a fire in students.  If there is a better way we should offer it even if it defies tradition.

  The most challenging week for me was lesson planning with the 5E's.  Talk about a departure from tradition, again I felt like I was in a foreign country trying to read a street map.  Now it all makes sense.  I can see clearly how the science teacher was using the 5E approach to teach his unit plan on optics.  It's amazing how hind sight is so perfect.  It all adds up; to authentically teach through inquiry the rules change and the planning changes.  While it will take some getting use to and it will feel uncomfortable for a while, I am going to build my lessons with the 5E's in mind so that I can focus my intentions with more precision and validity.  In this environment, I feel like the light spinning around in the lighthouse beckoning my students and guiding their way or the coast guard monitoring progress along side.  The students are out there in the sea learning how to navigate their surroundings, problem solving and testing their beliefs and prior knowledge to get them back to shore.  Students need to engage fully to make it back.  This is how I view inquiry and the hands on approach to student learning.  If I put them all on my ship and did all the work to get them to the shore, what have they learned?  Putting the tools in their hands, teaching them process skills and then letting them control their own ships while keeping a close eye on their progress (formative assessments) that's learning, that's powerful and that's what I believe our students need in their education.

  When first trying out this approach, I believe the hardest part is letting go and watching students fall.  As teachers we don't want our students to fail.  It is safer to hold on to the control and walk them through the facts and concepts.  It's a lot like taking the training wheels off the bike and gradually letting go.  They are going to fall but by falling they learn and with practice they become successful and competent riders.

  In addition to utilizing the 5E's in my classroom, I am also going to work on engaging students with Web 2.0 tools and presentations that I create to introduce concepts, explore facts and raise questions.  I just finished my first Prezi presentation on book genres.  I will be using this to reinforce and examine the two major genres and the sub-genres.  The students will get to listen in to examples of books through storylineonline.com and come up with characteristics for each genre.  I am also working on a Nearpod presentation on nonfiction that my students can participate in during guided reading instruction.  Kidblog.org has already proven to be invaluable to the students learning and I would like to add a class wiki as well.  The students are building videos with Animoto to demonstrate their understanding of concepts learned in class.  The process skills that students are learning and strengthening through the use of these tools will serve them throughout their lives.

  Overall, from what I've learned through this course, teaching and learning in my classroom can only get better from here.  

 

Unit 6: Inquiry Based Lessons

     This week has been quite interesting.  I have come to understand how to plan for and connect the 5E's while teaching inquiry based lessons.  The 5E flow chart is a lot different from anything I have used before for lesson planning and it takes some doing to get comfortable with the idea, however, I can see the benefit to planning this way.  This type of planning forces you to evaluate everything you do and connect it back to the overarching concept you want your students to master. 

   From my example above you can see how every part of the lesson is connected and justified to every other part of the lesson.  This takes more planning upfront but makes everything I do more thought out and meaningful to my students.   
 
   It was also good to look at the web 2.0 tools and see how they can be incorporated into this format of inquiry based lesson planning.  Everything is starting to come together this week from process skills to student inquiry to tools and lesson planning.  I think next week will be even more clear as we create the assessment piece and then a full unit plan that entails everything we have learned. 

Unit 5 Reflection: Engaging Students with Web 2.0 Tools and Inquiry

     This week, I have come to see even more, the value of web 2.0 tools in my classroom as it relates to student engagement and the process skills, the abilities and understanding of inquiry and the three key findings listed below.

1.    Students come to the classroom with preconceptions about how the world works. If their initial understanding is not engaged, they may fail to grasp the new concepts and information, or they may learn them for purposes of a test but revert to their preconceptions outside the classroom.

2. To develop competence in an area of inquiry, students must (a) have a deep foundation of factual knowledge, (b) understand facts and ideas in the context of a conceptual framework, and (c) organize knowledge in ways that facilitate retrieval and application.

3.  A "metacognitive" approach to instruction can help students learn to take control of their own learning by defining learning goals and monitoring their progress in achieving them (pp. 1-2)

     In order for students to learn they must be engaged and make connections to their prior knowledge.  I often tell my students to look in their brain dictionaries for vocabulary that they can link with the new facts and concepts that I’m teaching them.  When I introduce a new vocabulary word or skill, I simply write it on the board and then ask students to make any connections they can with it.  They turn and talk with their neighbor to share their ideas.  For example, I introduced contractions this week.  Students came up with similar sounding words such as construction and subtraction.  They didn’t pull out the meaning of contract but they are second graders so I wasn’t looking for that, I just wanted to get them to start a connection so we had something to build on.  Construction worked because we are constructing a new word and subtraction worked because we are subtracting letters in order to make the new word.  Now students had something to connect with and at least a temporary place in their brain dictionaries to store the new word.  I used a video from Grammar Jammar to build their prior knowledge and connect contraction with the concept that they were probably already familiar with or had seen in books.  The video plays a song and characters dance and the examples of contractions appear and move around on the screen as they go from being two words into a contraction.  The word apostrophe is introduced here as well.  Students were able to connect apostrophe with a comma but that an apostrophe is on sky line and the comma is on the grass line.  I could see that students were engaged during this lesson because they were active.  During the video they were trying to sing along and calling out connections.  “I’ve seen that word before!”  “Hey, that looks like a comma!  We learned about comma’s last week.” After the video, I asked students again to turn and talk and share their new ideas with their partner.  Now light bulbs were going off.  They had all seen contractions before they just didn’t know what they were called or the right way to build them.  The activity that I assigned the students was to copy four examples from the board: could not, do not, does not and can not and turn them into contractions on their Kidblog.  Here is their finished blog example.  

     From here I could see where the students were at with building contractions using 'not'.  They also went in and commented on each other’s blogs to help teach each other the rule of dropping the o.  In the next lesson I showed students another video from Grammar Jammar that explained how to make contractions with other endings such as is and have.  We built these types of contractions together and students identified the rules.  In the third lesson, we revisited the video and sang along so students could have a jingle to help them remember the rules when building contractions.  I then had them write two words on a sticky note and the matching contraction on another sticky note.  I collected them and ruled out any misconceptions.  One student overgeneralized the rule and wrote Barcavage is and Barcavage’s so I was able to take a quick teachable moment to get the student back on track.  I handed out the sticky notes and did a mix freeze.  The students paired up and went around the circle reading the two words and then the matching contraction.  Students then went back to their blogs and wrote what they learned about contractions.  At the end, I had a few of them share what they wrote on the Smartboard and the class gave them feedback on their writing and their ideas so the student could edit and revise.  Students now have the word contraction linked in their brain dictionaries in several places.  They already had examples of contractions filed away now they have the word connected to them and the rules are linked in with the appropriate contraction.  I always tell my students in order to learn new vocabulary you have to speak it, read it and write it over and over and over again.  Next week, I am going to have students use what they know now to understand irregularities in contractions such as making will not into won’t.   I would like them to build a presentation at the end of the week to apply their understanding.  Does anyone have suggestions for what they could use?  I was thinking maybe the Popplet app where they could do a word splash of contractions or maybe ShowMe. 

     As I continue to build upon my understanding of using inquiry based learning in my classroom I will utilize technology with student engagement in mind.  From this week’s readings and discussions, I feel more validated for the time and energy I’ve put in to making technology accessible and useable for my students.  They are learning new ways to communicate and how to be responsible in an online community.  I am excited to see how all this connects and encourages students to take ownership of their learning while mastering new concepts and building lifelong process skills.