Grant proposal mailed Friday

After four months of hard work and much writing, the grant proposal went out in the mail. Now we have to wait and see if we achieve success. While waiting I need to practice and relearn some of my Web 2.0 technologies. Good news immediately is that the team will be attending the 2008 NECC Conference in San Antonio, TX at the end of June. Last year's conference was wonderful; this year we can concentrate more on the nuts and bolts of Web 2.0 instead of the broad strokes.

Podcasts online

Using the new Web 2.0 techology of podcasting, my American History and World History section summaries are now posted online on the school's website, www.shsvp.com.
The students are using them for test reviews so it is another tool for learning. Student podcasts will be posted online soon in American History from their VFW essays.

Google Docs and Spreadsheets

As usual I am working on learning a new technology, this time it is Google Docs and Spreadsheets. This web based sharing tool could almost take the place of a wiki and allow students to collaborate on projects with access from any computer. This is something to think about and play around with. I created this quick syllabus original document and uploaded it to this blog; potential there.

Renweb is now installed on all my computers and probably next week we'll have a workshop to learn that new system allowing parents to see grades and assignments.

This has really been a technology loaded summer what with attending the NECC conference in Atlanta and trying to digest lots of new things in preparation for writing the grant. Let's hope this all comes together in a meaningful way.
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"Powerbook surgery". Sarae's photostream. posted January 22, 2006. Canon Powershot S410 camera http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarae/90106817/

American History Syllabus

Sacred Heart High School

2007-2008

First Grading Period

Chapters 4,5,6,7,8

Project: VFW essay and podcast

Second Grading Period

Chapters 9,10,11,12,13

Project: Critical Thinking Biography

Third Grading Period

Chapters 14, 15, 16, 17, 18

Project: Important Battle Power Point Presentation organized by a wiki

Fourth Grading Period

Chapter 19, 20, 21, 22, 23

Project deadlines will run over so this is overlap catchup time

Each grading period has an Academic Assessment Rubic grade worth 50 points.

Death by Power Point

Read an interesting blog entry by Doug Belshaw from the UK about people who put up a Power Point slide presentation and then preceed to read directly from it. Boring!!!!! I agree and have been in that situation myself. However, I find myself doing that somewhat in class lecturing and the students copying the notes off the Power Point slides. At first seven years ago I was really bad and had way too many slides and notes. I guess I felt a complusion to put everything in writing up on the screen. I am better; now I have only 6 slides per chapter and am only doing American History myself with the new books we have chosen. World History and World Geography provide Power Point slide shows per chapter that are less wordy and more thought provoking. So, I am trying to learn how to do that; lecture and make the students actually read the material and use the slide presentations for more critical thinking. I am a work in progress.

Another web 2.0 tool to master

Today I am conquering del.icio.us. Let's see what all this tagging is about.

Doneness vs Ongoing Conversation

An interesting post by David Warlick School 2.0 is a lot of Things + Conversation poses the question of "doneness" or project completion in schools versus lifelong, ongoing, continuing conversation type learning. I have been struggling with this concept since I got swamped with all this Web 2.0 business this spring. It seems to be a struggle that I can best deal with through balance; using the tools of web or school 2.0 to inspire true learning and literacy but meeting the requirements of grades and completeness. In a way, the struggle is not new-- weren't we also trying to achieve the same balance in our own educations? It is just now the tools are so much more powerful than a pencil and a Big Chief tablet. I know the end result is not just a podcast or a blog or a comic book but the ongoing challenge and experience and opportunity for inspiration to a student. But like life, there are beginnings, and middles, and ends to mark even things that are ongoing.

Learning yet another skill

Working with Google docs and spreadsheets, I came across their photo sharing site, Picasa web albums and this is an attempt to embed a slideshow of pictures into this blog from the trip I took in June with my mom, sister, and daughter, Bessie to Pennsylvania.

Checking out Google Maps

OK, so I am trying to conquer Google Maps and Google Earth based on all the new information I learned in Atlanta at the NECC conference. I want to use these new resources in my World Goegraphy class this yer and of course, write some dynamic lesson plans for the grant. So, I have been playing around and will attach a link to a map I made of Evangeline Parish. http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&msid=117514730902477349265.00000111fcfaab912bdb8&ll=30.709962,-92.308502&spn=0.524232,0.925598&z=10&om=1

OK, so now let't try to reduce the size of this url by using tinyurl.com and see if that works. http://tinyurl.com/3ymohn

My NECC of the woods

My first NECC conference was absolutely amazing. A three member team from my small Catholic high school in Louisiana braved the trip to Atlanta and found a whole new world of technology. Just the number of people using laptops was a novelty to us. The other teacher on the team and I have never even unhooked our laptop tablets from the InFocus machine to take home. We are concerned we cannot rehook them the next day and then we will not be able to use the InFocus viewer. Obviously, our technology level is somewhere way at the bottom of the ladder. At least one of the immediate things we are going to do is learn that skill and how to effectively use those tablet laptops. Our technology supervisor member of the team has promised to give us the training we never had.

Our group split up the sessions we attended and for my part, I was wowed by the amount of information being distributed and the level of energy used in presenting the ideas. I met Will Richardson whose book I had just read, heard David Warlick give a most inspiring talk, and saw Vicki Davis present on wikis and her international project. Everyone was interesting and the whole experience for a novice to web 2.0 is overwhelming. However, the best information I came away with concerns the use of Google Earth and I missed the poster talk of Joan Kane from the Chicago Public Schools. By the time I got to her table she was packing up her things. But, she told me to download the handout and boy, am I glad I did. Her tag is n07s511 and I cannot say how much all the information she gives out will help me. I needed basic ideas and instructions in a not so techky format. Hall Davidson's Staggeringly Good Things Integrating Media and Google Earth got too technical too quick and I am having trouble dealing with the handout. Thank you, Ms. Kane, for a real help to someone trying to incorporate Google Earth into a World Geography class. I finally feel that I can do some simple tasks and create some projects. I know I will get better as I go but starting was a little harder than I imagined. Many thanks, again.

Plagiarism Discussion

A very good discussion on traditional writing versus web 2.0 applications encouraged me to partaicipate. The forum was a blog by one of the more interesting people I try to read often and learn from.

How do you spell "potatoes"?

After spending a funfilled morning choosing plants at a nursery in Forest Hill, LA, "The Nursery Capital of Louisiana", my elderly mother, granddaughter, and I were eating lunch in a well known establishment in LeCompte, LA. During the course of our excellent meal, the young waitress came to the table and asked if I could spell "potatoes" for her; she and a couple of other young people working there needed to know. Without much thought, I spelled it correctly adding the es for the plural ending and made a cute comment about Dan Quayle not knowing to how to correctly add es and not just s to the end of the word. "It's funny you mention that", she said, "someone else told us about him too." Maybe she didn't believe the first person who had spelled the word for her???

Anyway, the other baby boomer customers in the restaurant and I had a quiet chuckle amongst ourselves about her not knowing either how to spell "potatoes" or who Dan Quayle was.

I found this incident most interesting in light of all that I have read about web 2.0 learning and the new literacy and the information age and the generation of digital natives. I could spell "potatoes" with my 1950s and 1960s education even though I am struggling with going up the next rung of the technology ladder and trying to engage my students to learn in a new age. Yet, this young person who was certainly out of high school and probably most adept at using all the new technologies didn't know how to spell a simple English word with perhaps a tricky plural ending but certainly something any baby boomer except Dan Quayle would know. It is just that sometimes it seems that basics are still important and despite all the technology, one must be able to communicate using the written word correctly. Anyway, I persist in trying to absorb all the new ideas in education.

Technology Successes this past school year

Self evaluation is a positive tool for seeing where you are and where you are going. So here is how I stand:

Technology Successes for school year 2006-2007
1. 1-1 laptop environment for all classes (American History, World History, and World Geography)
2. completion of two major projects per class including WWI comic books in American History and Digital Memory Books for a historical novel in World History
3. online testing via Quizstar.com for World Geography and at least three tests each for other two classes as well as using turnitin.com to check for plagiarism in writing
4. beginning of web 2.0 journey by reading several key books such as The World is Flat by Thomas L. Friedman, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts by Will Richardson, and Classroom Blogging by David F. Warlick
5. starting this blog and trying to feel more confident in writing more assertively
6. agreeing to write a new grant for high school to incorporate blogging, wikis, and podcasting into teaching
7. trying to learn more about Google Earth and Google maps and how to use them in the classroom particularly for projects
8. attending the NECC convention Georgia this summer
9. trying to push the edge of the envelope by learning technology skills such as taking an online class about Microsoft Word and using a lot of new web 2.0 sites I read about

Things I really need to accomplish to get to the next rung on the technology ladder:
1. include more web 2.0 aspects into my teaching and revamp projects to include these; that will entail discarding some of the things I have done in the past and incorporating new ideas
2. incorporate more online testing into each subject and to continue using turnitin.com
3. continue to personally blog and start commenting on ideas brought forth by other bloggers and perhaps commenting on their blogs
4. do a podcast this next school year using that VFW essay contest
5. attempt to do a project using a wiki
6. learn enough about Google Earth and Google maps to do projects in World Geography using these
7. write the grant well enough to get the funding
8. continue to learn how to use flickr, bloglines, and other tools to stay abreast with emerging technologies

Crash Course in another technology

My newest challenge this month is to learn how to use a palm pilot to some degree in time for the NECC convention. The Diocese is loaning each member of our Grant Team one for the duration of the convention. Since school is now out, I will focus on that for a few days. The backup plan is just to take notes and manage myself the old fashioned way--via a binder. We'll see how quickly I can gain a comfort zone with this new technology.

Atlanta Bound

As the school year ends an exciting new adventure awaits. A team of three from our school will travel to the NECC convention in Atlanta, Georgia to experience all the new ideas in using technology in education. We will be writing a new grant for our school upon return based on using laptop computers in the classroom on a 1 to 1 ratio. Two of us on the team are teachers and one is the technology coordinator. We two teachers, one a Junior/Senior English instructor, and myself, a social studies teacher, have been using laptop computers in our classroom for two years. We have done some very interesting and creative projects and felt very successful. However, we need to move up to the next rung of the ladder and learn the web 2.0 technologies. The diocesean office has even loaned us palm pilots which we have no clue how to use but will hopefully learn before we board the airplane. It is a brave new world and we are excited and determined to conquer it.

World War I Comic Book Project Completed

This school year the main technology connected project in American History for 11th graders was a comic book based on events and people in World War I. Now that they are all turned in and graded, I am most pleased with the quality of the work. Out of 59 students encompassing both semesters, I had 16 fabulous projects that are historically correct, well researched and documented both for sources and pictures, wonderfully designed both visually and organizationally, as well as having an appropriate moral and individual comic genre type effects. These projects were completed in class on laptop computers having about 45 minutes per class period for a period of about 1 month. Some students chose to also stay after school and continue working. One of the rewards of teaching is seeing the high quality of critical thinking and design that students are capable of achieving when challenged. I am ending the year with this class feeling like we really accomplished something.

Connecting to Technorati

Once again I am stretching my comfort zone and trying to keep up with all the new web tools by connecting this blog to technorati. I hope the world wants to hear what I have to say; the least of which I can more completely hear what the world is saying. Technorati Profile

Teaching myself new technologies and ideas for the classroom

I was just reading David Warlick's blog and was struck by the post of May 9th about teachers resisting technology and waiting for someone to teach them how to do something using the computers. I see that often in my own world; I have been guilty of it myself at times. He writes that teachers should just get with the program and teach themselves what they need to do. We are involved in a process of learning and need to keep up with the digital world of our students. I am trying to do just that in preparation for writing a new grant for my classroom. I have read books and blogs and see the vision; now I have to just jump into the pool which can't be totally done until new Internet policies are written at our school and the new server is set up. Hey, I just learned how to insert a link into my blog. Now I have substantiated my thoughts with a reference. I have achieved success today in a minor way.

World War I Comic Books due at the end of the week

As the semester starts drawing to a close, our second technology connected project is coming due this week. Friday, May 11, 2007 is the due date for turning in your comic book based on a World War I topic. Each day before Friday, extra points will be added based on how early you manage to get the finished project into my hands. Don't forget to fill out your rubric and include the proof of your printed source. So far the ones that have been turned in are meeting most of the established criteria. I am anxious to see them all.

Considering myself tagged.....

I was just reading in the blog of a young teacher who is very tech savvy the reasons he blogs and said the reader could consider themselves tagged. So, I will ponder the reasons I have begun blogging.

1. This is cutting edge educational technology and as an older teacher trying to keep up with educational trends,I want to be in the mix. I use technology in my classroom quite effectively I thought until I discovered the world had passed my by and the Read/Write web was in existence. So, I am trying to go up the next rung in the ladder and see if I can do it. Most of the edubloggers that I have been reading so far seem to be fairly young and are most probably children of technology themselves. I just hope I can keep up.

2. I do like to write and this is a forum for putting one's thoughts in order. It is a space to communticate to the world what one is thinking or wanting to learn.

3. I feel I have been able to network with people who do want to use technology in their classrooms; not everyone does yet in my physical world and it is good to know there is a lot of dynamic stuff going on out there.

4. Reading student blogs I see the power of writing and connecting to the world and I want my students to experience that. So, I need to practice blogging myself to get the swing of it before I can expect my students to be able to engage in effective connective writing.

5. This is fun in a way; I hope to develop into someone with a real voice. As of now, I feel somewhat tentative and lacking in something of value to share with the rest of the world.

Attempting to wiki

Now that I have begun to grasp blogging and have actually done some and will show my efforts to my current students tomorrow,I am going to try to tackle using a wiki. I have read up on them and have set one up;now I have to think of some creative way to use it with my students. But, I have a simple idea to try in a day or two just to get a feel for this "living organism". Lo and behold, as I log into my peanut butter wiki this evening, I see a notice that all educational wikis on this site are going to be ad free. That will be a blessing. And in conjunction with that, for mentioning my peanut butter wiki on this blog they will give me extra space to use. That will come in very handy next fall with my students as I try to do collaborative writing with about 70 students or more. This site uses the tagline that making a pbwiki is as easy as making a peanut butter sandwich. I did set my up easily and plan to incorporate it into my classes soon.

Beginning a long journey.......

The last three weeks have been an awakening for me. I just agreed to participate in writing a new grant for my school without realizing I was stepping into a whole new world. My use of technology thus far in the classroom has been challenging and fun but was confined to things my students did for me on the computer emphasizing reading, writing, researching, documenting, and critical thinking skills. All are valuable skills and abilities and we have produced, over a five year period, and are still producing incredibly wondeful technology-connected projects. My favorites have been historically related comic books and digital memory books based on a character in a work of historical literature. At first we only had a few computers in the classroom but the last two years have seen the introduction of individual laptop computers.

But now, I have read Thomas L. Friedman's book, The World is Flat, and am trying to consume and digest minutely Will Richardson's book, Blogs, Wikis, and Podcasts. I have been introduced to the world of the Read/Write web and my life has been changed dramatically. I see a new potential for the internet in the learning process and want to begin using all the new possibilities. But, how to master them all rather quickly is the problem. Luckily, I will be attending the NECC conference in Atlanta, GA this summer and I have already carefully chosen my presentations to attend. I have also been reading voraciously blogs of other educators and just seeing what some of them are doing with their students is amazing. I only hope I can get to that place some day. In the meantime I am setting up this blogging site to begin the blogging process myself so I can model to my students. I have also started learning about wikis, RSS, furl, and many other things that three weeks ago I did not know existed. At least I had heard of blogging but had no idea of its educational opportunities.

So, now as this semester winds down, I am trying to absorb as much as I can before I actually have to begin to think of what I want to do with this new grant writing opportunity and then actually have to write something I have never done before. I have always heard the old Chinese saying that the longest journey begins with but a single step. I have just taken that step. I only hope I enjoy the journey along the way.

Great Depression Extra Material

I just discovered a wonderful new resource, a slideshow sharing site, and will try out one presentation to further enhance student understanding of this period in American History.




After viewing this power point presentation, reflect upon the impact the great depression had on the lives of ordinary people. Login to turnitin.com going to the discussion board and submitting your thoughts there.

Miss Julia's Classroom Rules

Welcome to an exciting new experience in Social Studies Education!!!
Basic rules for classroom blogging:

1. 1. Students using blogs are expected to treat blogspaces as classroom spaces. Speech that is in appropriate for class is not appropriate for your blog. While we encourage you to engage in debate and conversation with other bloggers, we also expect that you will conduct yourself in a manner reflective of a representative of this school
   
   
2. Student blogs are to be a forum for student expression. However, they are first and foremost a tool for learning, and as such will sometimes be constrained by the various requirements and rules of this classroom teacher.
   
3. Students using blogs are expected to act safely by keeping personal information out of their posts. You agree to not post or give out your family name, password, user name, e-mail address, school name, city, country, or other information that could help someone locate or contact you in person. You may share your interests, ideas, and preferences.
   
4. Students' blogs are to be a vehicle for sharing student writing with real audiences. Most visitors to your blog who leave comments will leave respectful, helpful messages. If you receive a comment that make you feel uncomfortable or is not respectful, tell your teacher right away. Do not respond to the comment.


5. Students using the free blog sites must take good care of the computers by not downloading or installing any software without permission, and must also not click on any of the ads or competitions. Additionally, students may not use blogging time to be doing anything else on the computer like gaming.