Ground Floor

About three weeks before the end of the school year, I had a meeting with our district's IT director.  We had a really good discussion about how our we have committed many resources towards keeping the tech running but nothing in the way of developing a plan for implementation.  This conversation quickly turned into the district deciding to free up my afternoons to help with this. 

Things I know

• Technology isn't going to make a bad teacher a good teacher.
• Using tech to do the exact same things we've done without tech isn't productive.
• Teachers don't like change.
• Anything that comes from the district office is treated like a mandate and resisted.
• "How do I use this?" is the wrong question.
• "Why should I use this?" is a better question.
• Professional development in the way of workshops isn't very effective.
• Conversations are.

Questions I have

• Where does assessment/grading fit into this conversation?
•  Are we looking to transform what we do in the classroom?
• Why should anyone listen to what I have to say?
• Where do I start?

I'm not really interested in throwing a bunch of tools into the laps of teachers.  However, I'm very interested in engaging in conversations with teachers about why we do what we do and questioning whether or not there exists a tool that will help us do things better.  I threw a bunch of these questions in the lap of my IT director and found myself sitting before our superintendent of curriculum and instruction.

I can't imagine the meeting going better. It was great to see someone with 40+ years in education saying that we need to look at what we do and why we do it.  Many of the questions I had, she had as well.  One thing we knew for sure was that this vision is fluid and we are in the process of creating it.  Questions are encouraged.  Push back is needed.  Transparency is critical. 

Lots of rope. Hope I don't hang myself with it.

A Little Help'd Be Nice

So why do districts have a staff full of IT people who are great at networking, troubleshooting hardware/software problems, etc. but don't have a single person to help teachers implement the technology in their classrooms?  Why are there  SmartBoards all over the place and many of them are used as the screen for the overhead projector?  Or maybe, just maybe they are being used as a glorified white boards whose markers don't run out of ink. 

Where is the person who can show a teacher how to use a SmartBoard in their specific content area? 
Where is the person who says, "what types of things would you like to do in your classroom and how can I help you find ways of doing that?"

Where is the person who can actually take the time to research different tools and help teachers use them to take their current lessons to a different level? 

Where is the person who has an understanding of the curriculum and can help teachers develop lessons that they never thought were possible?

I'm not upset or anything.  Just askin'.

To Wiki or Not to Wiki

I know, I know:

"Using a tool for it's own sake is bad pedagogy." 

"Have an objective and then find the tool that will help you best meet that objective."

"If your favorite tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

Blah, blah, blah.

What if you didn't know if your objective was even possible until you tried out the tool?  Then what?

I completely understand Kate's frustration when it comes to the speed bumps caused when we try to rely on certain tools.  But what about just making the tool available and allowing kids to come and go as they see fit?  Why can't we do that?  Does everything have to have a lesson plan attached to it? 

I originally created this wiki just because I could.  I let kids take some class time to familiarize themselves with how to use it--in fact, we learned how to use it together.  But the space has taken on a life of it's own.  I have kids who are now in high school coming back to access the resources they created last year. 

That's a good thing, no?

Whatever It Takes

Our campus has been having some great conversations centered on developing tiered lessons that allow for differentiation depending not only on ability level but on learning modality.  How can we reach a student at their appropriate cognitive level while respecting whether they are an auditory, visual or kinesthetic learner?  Now, I am no cognitive scientist nor am I an expert at developing curriculum.  But I do know that meeting kids where they are is a good idea.  How we implement that is a different story.  Haven't figured that one out.

Last year I had a student who would have bounced off the walls if I didn't keep him engaged.  Getting this kid to do homework was nearly impossible because it interfered with his gaming time. 

"Look over your notes tonight," I'd say.

"Yeah, right," he'd think.  "What do I want to do that for? I gotta date with Xbox Live!"

But then I started a channel on blip.tv where I would upload any mathcasts I created so students would have access to them from home.  Dang it if this kid didn't subscribe to the RSS feed.  It hit me when one day after a test, he told me:

"Hey Mr. Cox, that test was easy.  I watched the examples on my PSP last night." 

Do these digital natives process information differently?  Is this a new modality?

Sincerely, Markus Hohenwarter

Every day at 5:00 pm I receive an email from Markus Hohenwarter.  It isn't a "hey how are you doing?" kind of email, this one is all business.  Actually it isn't even a personal email, it is one of those mass emails that often ends up in the spam box.  But more times than not, this spam is worth reading. 

Markus Hohenwarter is the creator of GeoGebra which has to be one of my top three classroom tools.  The email is generated by the Geogebra upload manager and lists all of the different GeoGebra files (both .html and .ggb) that have been uploaded to the bank during the previous day.   Many of the dynamic .html worksheets are ready for classroom use and author attribution is at the bottom of the page.  However, if you like the concept of the worksheet but would like to use your own questions, you can download the .ggb file and learn how the sheet was created by viewing the construction protocol. 

The only downside to the upload manager is that the uploads aren't tagged, so you have to do bit of hunting to find someting worth while.  Regardless, this is yet another reason to love GeoGebra!

What Did They Do With It?

So I took a stab at letting my kids have a go at Dan's last installment. And to say I was pleased is the understatement of the year.  The first obvious question was "will it go in the can?" But, since we have finished going over parabolas, kids started asking questions like:

• How high was the ball at its highest point?


• How far did it travel?


• What was its velocity?


• How long was the ball in the air?

The question that really opened one of those "teachable moments" was in regards to velocity.  To this point we have only covered vertical motion.  These kids understand how to model a falling object as well as an object with an initial velocity other than 0.  This led to an interesting discussion.  Does the "falling object" or "thrown object" apply here?  And that is when Lio hit the nail right on the head. 

He pipes up with, "Hey Mr. Cox, if we shoot a gun horizontally and drop a bullet from the same height instantaneously, they both hit the ground at the same time right?"

"Yup."

"So does the fact that it is travelling horizontally have anything to do with how fast it falls?"

"Nope."

"So can we use the stuff we know about falling objects here?"

"Yup."

"But we need heights." 

"Well I guess we are done here."

That is when Seth walks over to the trash can and measures how tall it is.  All these trash cans have to be the same, right?



And the rest is history.  The kids opened up the computers, dragged the images into the SmartNotebook software and here is what Group 1 came up with: 

Here is where it gets really cool.  My other Seth asks if we can find the actual distance the ball travels along the parabola.  He thinks that if we can measure the distance between the balls, then we could get a series of straight lines.  He comes to the conclusion that the closer the balls are to each other, the more accurate our approximation is. 

Wait till he gets a load of Calculus.  Did I mention he is 13?

The Easter Egg Hunt

Every nine weeks my district gives benchmark exams covering approximately one-third of the standards that have been deemed "essential."  Many teachers feel the need to do a bunch of last minute cramming and do intensive review.  For the most part, I see the benchmark as a speedbump; one of those things that I have to do.  I mean, I we already have department CFAs (common formative assessments) that we use to re-direct our instruction, so I pretty much already know where my kids stand.  So for the last benchmark of the year, I decided to change up the review.

I made up a practice test covering the standards that would be assessed, uploaded it to voicethread and had students sign up to create a mathcast for specific problems.  However, this time they were looking for a fastball up and in and I gave them a change away. I asked a few students to do the problems incorrectly (of course, first they had to demonstrate to me that they could do the problem right.) Once everyone had added their comments to the Voicethread, I assigned the Easter Egg Hunt--Which ones are wrong and why? I think I really like this activity. Students not only have to work out each problem themselves, but they have to view another's work critically. I would love to hear what you think.