Edublog Award Nominations

It is time to nominate bloggers for Edublog Awards.  You can nominate your favorite blogs before Friday, December 2.  What are you waiting for?  Here are mine:

Best class blog - Nancy VonWalde - ISP Grade 3V - An excellent start to blogging with grade 3 students.

Best ed tech / resource sharing blog - Keith Ferrel - Ed Tech Ideas - A waterfall of resources focused on elementary students and teachers.

Best teacher blog - John Crane - Second Year IB Psychology - Resources, links and info for the IB Psychology student.

Best librarian / library blog - The Daring Librarian - Fellow GCTer Gwyneth blogs about all things info lit.

Best School Administrator blog - Arnie Bieber - School21C - Conversations about the future of education.

Best free web tool - Google Apps for Education - Collaboration has never been so easy.

Lifetime achievement - Kim Cofino - I'm "always learning" from Kim, who inspires so many of us in the edtech world. 

Turntable Trig

Today we experimented with using iPads in a math class.  We had 3 school-owned iPads as well as one brought in by a student.  Students used the Vernier Video Physics app in groups of two or three to review and investigate trig graphs.

[caption id="attachment_320" align="alignleft" width="222" caption="Turntable Graph"][/caption]

Ms. Flaherty first reviewed a couple of math concepts that the students had already  reviewed as part of their homework by watching a YouTube clip.  Then I demonstrated how to use the various tools built into the Video Physics app to plot the points of a sticky note as it travels around a Fisher Price Turntable, and to set the scale and change the location of the origin.  From there, we handed off the iPads to the students and away they went.

Once students plotted the path of the sticky note, and viewed the resulting graph, they then worked through the following prompts:

1.  Find the equation of your curve.


2. How does the equation change as you change the A.) origin, B.) scale?


3. By adjusting the position of the origin and the scale crate a graph that has:  A.) An amplitude of 5  B.) A wave axis of 10

Findings, Thoughts, Reflections:

• Students were engaged in the hands-on learning, and shared the device appropriately around the group so that everyone got a chance to manipulate the data.


• Students are really comfortable with iPads.  They took to the app quickly and were easily able to use the gestures to perform specific tasks within the app.


•  Investigative Math rocks.  I wish that when I was learning math I had had access to the tools that students have today.  Changing different variables and seeing how that affects the output helps students get a better understanding than just working out problems.


• Personal devices are better than school-owned devices.  When the teacher asked students to send her the files this became obvious.  The student who was using his own device easily emailed a few photos to the teacher because his email was already set up in the iPad's system.  Web versions of email (we tried gmail) don't allow attaching files from an iPad because they don't know how to navigate the iPad file system.  The work around is to either attach the ipad to a laptop and use iPhoto (or another photo app on a PC) to pull down the images, or have students enter their email info into the iPad system, send the files, then delete the account before the class ends and their email account and ipad are handed off to another student.

European Student Film Festival

This past week International School of Prague hosted an amazing learning event, The European Student Film Festival, where students attended workshops on story, lighting, music, digital sound, camera work, casting, and competed in a 24 Hour Film Challenge.  The excitement about the event is still evident in the hallways this week as students continue to talk about what an exceptional and inspiring event it was.  I was impressed by the student creativity and problem solving displayed throughout the festival, and the overall quality of films that were submitted in the regular competition as well as the 24 Hour Film Festival.  I've embedded a playlist of the festival winners in this post, and here are links to the challenge films as well as the entire lot of competition submissions.

Interacting with Experts

[caption id="attachment_300" align="alignright" width="132" caption="Stuart"][/caption]

 

Interacting with experts is not something our students get to do every day, but an especially keen, risk-taking teacher that I work with showed me that it isn't that difficult any more.  In Mrs. Caskie's IB Language and Lit class, the students have been reading Stuart, by Alexander Masters....and then asking questions of the author.

Mrs. Caskie stumbled across Masters' blog and, on a whim,  asked if it was "okay" for students to write him and ask questions.  Then she asked her students to think about what they would want to ask the author as they read the book.  This was a theme that she kept repeating until she finally said, "then let's ask him - he's got a blog."  So they did.  And Masters has been responding to the questions one by one making this learning opportunity particularly personalized.

Mrs. Caskie is excited about how this interaction with the author might serve as a springboard for some creative written or oral tasks.  Some of the student generated ideas are:

• a transcript of a "lost tape" of Stuart's


• putting Masters on trial for exploiting the homeless/disabled person with students writing the court transcript, 


• a missing chapter - perhaps of when Stuart was young and happy


• a comparison piece with Masters and Orwell meeting up and discussing identity, culture and the idea of moving.   

As with most authentic tasks, the students have been engaged and motivated.  My own learning is not something new, but a reminder of just how powerful technology is - it can connect us with professionals.  In the case of these students, technology has given them the opportunity to include a professional author in their Personal Learning Network.  We should sieze the opportunity to make this happen for more students; apparently all you have to do is ask.

If you've read Stuart, you may want to check out Masters' latest book: The Genius in My Basement

Making Music

I came across Diego Stocco's videos thanks to a post on an inspiring design blog that I read. Diego can make music out of pretty much anything (listen to what he can do with a Bonsai tree).  Our IB Music teacher, Mr. Ackerman, assigns his students something similar: to compose music using only items in the kitchen.  This "Kitchen Etude" is designed to give students, no matter their ability, an opportunity to successfully compose music.  It seems that most of our students wanted to use Apple's GarageBand to record their composition.  Check out Arye's composition using only items from his kitchen.  Arye's Kitchen Etude

Google Workshop for Educators in Prague

We just completed a fun-filled day of collaboration and sharing with other educators from around Europe.  @WendyGorton did an excellent job of sharing Google tools and facilitating discussion about their uses in schools.  My favorite new learning of the day was creating a Google Search Story.  Here is my attempt at promoting the new books in our ISP library.

In Class Audio Recording and Reflection

An amazing teacher and colleague of mine introduced me to an excellent way of leveraging technology for learning today. It is actually quite simple, but brilliant at the same time.

Ms. Caskie's grade 9 students have been studying Farenheight 451. She assigned her students to take a character from the book and craft a monologue from the point of view of that character that they would deliver to the class acting as that character.  Ms. Caskie asked students to record themselves practicing their monologue at home.  She then had them record themselves when they presented to the class.  Students then posted both versions on their blogs and were asked to reflect on them - comparing and contrasting - and identify skills to focus on for future class presentations.   Students seemed to really buy in to this authentic self-assessment; here is an example.