The current system needs to be changed and the best way to do that is to train teachers in new styles of teaching and to give students a purpose for learning/participating outside of grading.
Two:
Students need to have some sense of being in charge of their own education. Teachers should provide choices and give students a lot of opportunities for self-reflection.
Three:
Students need to be challenged in order to learn. Teachers need to be able to adjust their plans based on student progress.
Overall…
I really enjoyed reading this book! I have learned so many things and reflecting on them here in my blog posts solidified my ability to take these ideas and use them in my online classroom so that my students can have a better experience. I would highly recommend reading this book!
Students learn a lot about being good people and building character at home and in young grades. But sometimes those topics get pushed to the side in High School because there is so much content to cover in each class already. However, Muir brings up the idea of using content-specific service learning to continue to develop students’ character while also keeping up with required class material.
I wanted to look more into the impact that service learning can have on students and the school environment as a whole. In my research I found an amazing blog post by Peter DeWitt, The Importance of Service Learning. One quote in particular stood out to me, “Service learning projects can be life changing for students. They learn empathy for others, and may even get the real life experience they need which will inspire them to find a career.” I think that the key here is the idea that service learning provides students with real life experience. I was fortunate to grow up with parents that took me to museums, volunteer work, and provided me with other experiences that prepared me for the future, but many students do not have that at home. That gap in the experiences of students at home follows them to their futures, unless we do something about it. Here are two awesome articles about the growing opportunity gap in our education system:
I know that Multiple Choice Tests are sometimes necessary, but I think that assessments need to go above and beyond that in order to be high-quality. Students need to be able to process the information and use it independently – not just memorize facts. And lets face it, when students are just memorizing facts they tend to forget them as soon as the test is over. For example, I spent 3 years in high school memorizing words in Spanish class and I do not remember anything from it now…
Quality Assessments get students thinking. They need to use the information they have learned along with their own skills and experiences to process that information into higher thinking answers. I am going to discuss the quality assessments that can be seen in my Art Appreciation class.
Essay Questions: From the very first test, students are asked to use the information they have learned to analyze a work of art. Meaning that they are not just listing off information they have learned from the class but they are using the strategies taught and applying them to the analysis of an actual work of art.
Hands On Activities: Throughout the class, students are asked to create art work based off of the lessons they have learned. One example of that is in the architecture unit. Students learn how architects design houses and other buildings, the symbols they use, the process they go through, and the technology they use to create digital renderings. Students use the information they have learned to draw the layout of their dream home as well as a rendering of what the front of the house would look like. Students are taking the information that they learned about the design and planning of buildings and applying it to a real project. And students really enjoy these hands on activities!
Overall, students learn more from quality assessments and teachers can more accurately see what students know and what they still need help with. Quality assessments often require higher level thinking rather than memorization, which is exactly what students need!
I may have borrowed my title from Michigan Virtual’s awesome presence at MACUL, but it really describes how I feel about the conference! I learned SO many amazing things there that I am implementing in my classes now. I came out of that experience refreshed and inspired to continue to help all of my students learn! Here are some of the things I am doing post-MACUL/Spring Synergy!
Twitter
I went to an awesome session about using twitter in the classroom (thanks @jasonaxelbowman) and I was inspired to start using class hashtags to share additional information with my students. I invited them to follow me on twitter and use the class hashtag to share class related material or exciting (school appropriate) news they would like to share! Here is the info:
@Ms_LGraham
#MVArchaeology
#MVArtApp
#MVFilmStudy
Getting to know my students more
I am now sending out at least 5 messages per class a day just asking students how they are doing and asking if they need help with anything. I am hoping this will open up even more conversations between my students and me.
I was also inspired to do a padlet that is personal, fun, and class related! I know, how did I do that all in one thing??? Well for my film studies classes I asked students to share a “Memorable Movie Moment” from their favorite film. Side note – I also discovered that you can set your padlet so that you have to approve all posts before they show up, which was necessary for this one since I had students including video clips. This is a super amazing feature that I did not know before this conference!
Changing the way I give feedback
I was inspired by a presentation at Spring Synergy to prioritize my feedback and make sure that I am spending the most time on vital assignments (papers and formative assignments where I can help before the student strays too far from the learning goals).
Reinforcing lessons with outside material
I was completely inspired by the awesome session of a panel of teachers, Carrie Moeggenberg, Garth Trask, David Theune, Mark Wells, Mark Schlaudt, and Erik Cliff. They presented a great session called “We Thought, We Inspired, We Created” that really made me see that I was only reaching the “middle” students in my courses, I wasn’t providing enough material to challenge high performing students and I wasn’t providing enough material to scaffold learning for struggling students. They spoke a lot about “cloning yourself” as in taking videos of yourself to help reach these other group of students. I am starting to not only take videos of myself like mentioned but also using outside sources that are meant to help with differentiating material for students. The main sources I use and would recommend is Khan academy, Crash Course, and Front Row Ed. Everything in Khan Academy and Front Row Ed is completely geared toward K-12 learning, but Crash Course is not so previewing all Crash Course videos is a must!
To start the conversation about mentors, I thought I would start with a funny story. At the beginning of the semester, students send me contact information for themselves and their parents, they also have to list there who their mentor is. I had one student who didn’t quite understand that mentor meant the person at his school that was supposed to help him with class-related things in person. So he wrote me this long paragraph about how amazing his dad is and how he is his mentor in life. Even though this wasn’t the answer I was looking for, it was an awesome answer!
So, now for building relationships with the actual mentors that I’m going to talk about today…
The biggest thing for building relationships is communication. I think it is important to communicate clearly and as often as possible with mentors. The more I talk with mentors, the more they get to know me and are comfortable reaching out to me about their students. When I reach out to a mentor about a student that is struggling I always end the email with something along the lines of “Thank you for your help and I know that together we can help (student name) have a successful semester!” I think that a line like this helps show the mentor that I want to have a partnership with them and really work with them to find what is best for each student.
Mentor’s can be very important allies and once you get to know a few, it seems easier to manage and help struggling students.
One of the hardest things for me to deal with as a teacher is students who copy their assignments from other sources. I am not talking about missing a citation on a quote or anything small like that, I am talking about a student fully copying an entire paper/assignment from a website or another student. I recently had a student that was under a lot of stress trying to finish up the class before the end of the semester that she decided to do just that. I could tell right away that something was off because her assignment, which was supposed to be an analysis of a crime, read more like a news article; it didn’t mention criminology theories or anything else from the class. So I did a little research and I discovered an article that was exactly the same, word for word.
I knew I had to talk to her and her mentor about it, but here is the important part, she had turned in a bunch of assignments that same day that I hadn’t graded yet. When I sent her a message about the assignment she immediately replied saying how sorry she was and that she would never do it again. I then took the opportunity to do what the title of the post says, I asked her if there are any other assignments that she turned in that she wants to redo before I look at them. She took this opportunity to redo a few other assignments, realizing that this was the time to be honest and turn in quality work. I was very proud that she chose to right her own wrongs with these other assignments. To me, that said a lot more about who she was than the copied assignment that I had seen earlier.
After this conversation, we had a great teacher-student relationship. I am really glad that I was able to turn what would have been a bad mistake into a learning opportunity, for both of us.
Communications: Teacher-Student, Teacher-Mentor, Teacher-Parent, and Student-Student
Out of these four categories, I selected Teacher-Student communications as my strength and Student-Student communications as my weakness. I think that I do a wonderful job of communicating with my students, not only important class information but also fun, get-to-know-each-other conversations. I think that I do a pretty good job in communicating with mentors and parents as well. But I know that my classes lack student-to-student communication. So, I am going to try and take the strategies I use to talk to my students, to get them to talk to each other.
The main strategy I use to connect with students is finding the similar interests we have. I talk to the students in the Grand Rapids area what they like to do around here (especially since I am new to the city), I talk to fellow Marvel fans about their favorite Avenger (mine is Iron Man, even though my dog’s name is Captain America), and I find other things to talk to students about as well baking, hiking, favorite books or movies, etc…). I am going to try to identify those things that students have in common with each other and get them to connect in that way. I am still figuring out a way to do this, but I am leaning towards creating a Discussion Board where students can chat about their interests with each other. I could start out by making a few posts for students to respond to, and then opening it up to allow students to create threads about their own interests (as long as it is school appropriate of course!).
I think that students getting to know each other better will help with academic discussion board responses. If they know each other then I think they will be more willing to comment back and forth about a class-relevant topic.
I will also be making more padlets where students can write back and forth to each other using comments. I think that my padlets have been very successful in the past because they are located right on the announcements page and they are attention grabbing.
Last week’s Webinar was AMAZING! I learned so much from my colleagues at Michigan Virtual that I ended up with a huge list of things to try!
The first thing that I tried was something suggested by my fellow iEducator Lauren Nalepa. She showed that on her announcements for er Digital Imaging class (a class that I am teaching for the first time this semester) she posts GIMP tutorial videos on her weekly announcements. So that is what I did this week!
Students are at the point in the semester for this class where they are working on their individual final portfolios. Because of this, there are not lessons that students are given specific to each week anymore. And I have see quite a few portfolio assignments using text. So I wanted to show students that more could be done than just plain old text in their assignments. And so this week, I shared the video below on creating a paint dripping effect on text. I also look forward to continuing to inspire my students with a new GIMP tutorial video each week. Thank you for the inspiration, Lauren Nalepa!
*Image below is a hyperlink to the video I shared with my students this week.
Today I decided to try to involve students in a big part of my life, exercise.
I am completely obsessed with my Fitbit and I thought that that would be a great way to connect with students. When I was in the Face-to-Face classroom I had a student that would ask me every day, “How many steps do you have today?” and we would compare our step count on our Fitbits. So I am going to try to connect with students virtually using the Fitbit app. I shared with them how they can download the app (they can just use the app, they don’t even have to have an actual Fitbit tracker), add me, and then join or start a competition.
I think that this is a great way to connect with students and share a big part of my life because it is promoting a healthy lifestyle and you can only see very basic personal information about a person. All they can really see is my first name, my step average, and any trophies I have received. We can also set up challenges that include 2-10 people on who can get the most steps in a week or weekend. I thought it would be fun to have these competitions and then (with permission) announce the winners on the weekly announcements.
I am very excited to see what comes of this new idea, and I hope I have a lot of students participate in this new way of connecting with one another.
***Update: I already had a student add me on Fitbit!***
