An off day

Today my Latin 1 class didn’t go very well. It wasn’t a bad class, nothing dramatic happened. But nothing really clicked either.

This year our school has switched to a rotating schedule with 7 classes that drops one class each day. So today my Latin 1 class met for the first time since last Thursday, a 3 day break.  Since the beginning of the second marking period, this class has met for 5 straight days only one week; between holidays, a parent conference day, and the rotation of the schedule this class has very little consistency. We also enjoyed our annual Saturnalia celebration two weeks ago, which is one of my favorite days of the year, but certainly turns our focus away from Latin grammar for more than a few days.

So now I find myself trying to review case endings and reviewing prepositional phrases that take either the ablative or accusative case in the last few days before vacation. I have a fun activity planned for tomorrow, kind of a cross between Simon Says and Dodge Ball using a Nerf football to keep everyone on their toes. But today was all about reviewing nouns, prepositions, case endings and vocabulary.

I’m finding that the biggest challenge (drawback?) to this schedule is the absolute lack of consistency. So often when I used to be able to find a groove with my class and logically end a unit with a quiz or activity, I’m now scrambling to fit the quiz in a day early because I won’t see them for a day or two or three. When students are out for a field trip, illness, or college visit – and then their class doesn’t meet the next day -  they easily can be away from Latin learning for nearly a week. No matter how many resources a teacher provides (on-line notes, posting homework on Edline, offering on-line “office hours”) the lack of routine makes language learning a real challenge. Gifted language learners seem to be getting along okay, since they can basically teach themselves. But the majority of my students have to work hard to master the vocabulary and grammar. Not hearing the language, not reading the words, not reviewing the grammar five days each week means that each day in class requires more time reviewing and less time moving forward.

So class didn’t go very well. And the study hall that met in our room the period before left the window open on a cold December day.  And 5 students came to class late. And 4 more students needed to use the bathroom.

Today was not a great day for learning Latin. I did the best I could. I hope that my students learned a little. Tomorrow will be a better day.  I’ve got my Nerf football ready to go!

Showing up is half the battle

Some thoughts for my students during cold and flu season:

Please do your part to stay healthy and be in school.

If you aren’t in class, for any reason, you should know by now that every homework assignment is posted on Edline. Often the handouts are uploaded, links are provided. I know you might not be feeling great. But if you’re well enough to be back in school, please do me (and your classmates) the courtesy of finding out what you’ve missed. If your internet is down, most work is also posted in my classroom. Or you could always contact a classmate. I’m happy to help each of you get caught up, but with so many of you absent over the past few weeks, it is impossible for me to repeat all of the lessons from each day that you were out.

When you ask me to come in early or stay after school to go over missed work or make up quizzes, please be respectful of my time and show up when you say you will. If you can’t come when you intended, it is polite to send an e-mail or leave me a note.

Whenever you have a planned absence – a college visit, a sports competition, a music performance, a doctor’s appointment, a driving test – remember that you are responsible for staying on track with all of your classes. You must go to Edline, you must contact a classmate. The library is open before and after school if you need to get on-line at school. You should be ready to jump right back in the day you return.

If you are absent, don’t lie about the reason. I care about you and I want you to be successful. If you are really sick, I want to be understanding and supportive. When you invent an excuse for your absence when one doesn’t really exist, you are wasting both your time and mine. My goal is to help you learn Latin, not to catch you in a lie.

I understand how many commitments you have, how much you need to do each day. When you are healthy, it is your job to be in school. If you are absent 10 or 15 days in a semester, you have missed all of those opportunities to learn and to contribute to the learning of your classmates. Attendance is not the only key to success, but showing up is half the battle.

Saturnalia 2009

It’s been so long since I’ve written, but I feel like I’ve neglected writing about my Latin classes. So much of my students’ work over the past year has involved integrating technology into our projects and learning. But one activity that comes around each December and has barely changed over the years is our Saturnalia celebration. Saturnalia was a celebration in honor of the founding of the Roman temple of Saturn that was marked by feasting, reversal of social roles, and the giving of gifts. The Romans would have celebrated the holiday beginning on December 17 (A.D. XVI Kal. Ianuarii). We reduce our celebration to one school day. This is the culminating activity for a unit on Mythology or Roman Culture (depending on course level). Every student comes to class in Roman or Greek dress, representing a god, goddess or historic figure.  Each student has researched his/her persona and brings symbols that best represent that figure. In addition to the costumes, students bring Roman-style food and drink to celebrate the day. Although they are not required to wear their costume outside of their Latin class, many students wear there togas all day long. This year our celebration will be this Friday. It is a big undertaking to organize so many students and all of the details. I look forward to sharing pictures and stories of our celebration this year after the party is done. Io Saturnalia!

K12 OnLine Conference 2009

For me, professional development is most meaningful when it really addresses what I can and want to do as an educator. Whether I’m learning a new tool for improving projects with my students or better understanding the learning styles of my students or better managing resources or time to improve my instruction doesn’t matter. I get more out of what I’m doing when I choose what I’m learning and not just sitting in the auditorium listening to a speaker whose job it is to inspire several hundred teachers when they would much rather be prepping their classrooms. Even more meaningful for me is being able to seek professional development at a time when I can truly focus on what is being shared. When my classroom needs to be set up, when I have grades due, when my kids are seeking attention I can’t pay attention no matter how interesting the presentation. For all of these reasons, the K12 Online Conference is so meaningful and powerful. This great collaboration of educators is available live and asynchronously as a learning opportunity for teachers and administrators. Workshops, talks, fireside chats, discussions and presentations will begin the week of November 30 and will continue for the two subsequent weeks. Join in when you can – even after the event, since all presentations are archived. Come join me and educators from around the world for this on-line professional development opportunity.

VoiceThread – Project ideas

VoiceThread is a great presentation tool that allows you to provide narration (in the form of comments) to accompany a slide show. Imagine taking a simple PowerPoint presentation and recording your presentation once and having it available for your students any time they are on-line. Students can leave responses or questions in the form of comments, either typed or recorded, to further the discussion. There’s even a “doodle” option, which allows you to highlight the section of the slide you’re referencing. The writing fades over time, allowing you to move on to another point without cluttering each slide with too many notes.

This week I am presenting 2 workshops with my colleague, Mrs. Mary Christine Dion, one for faculty at our high school and a second at the MassCUE Conference in Foxboro, Massachusetts.  We’ll be sharing this amazing tool with our colleagues and offering some ideas that we’ve tried with our own classes. We’ll also be offering a few tips to help avoid issues (as with all tools, VoiceThread is not perfect).

Project ideas and samples

My Latin 1 class recently completed a Latin Mottos project. Students searched for mottos in Latin that still are in use today. They found a single image that best showed the message of the motto. They uploaded the slideshow to VoiceThread and recorded themselves reading the Latin mottos. In addition to identifying uses of Latin in the modern world, students are demonstrating their mastery of Latin pronunciation.

Latin Philosophical Mottos

Latin Mottos about Death and Life

My Latin Studies classes are just now completing a storytelling project. Students were required to write a short story in Latin demonstrating their understanding of specific grammatical concepts (specifically, use/forms of certain noun cases and agreement with verbs and adjectives). They created a slideshow incorporating the text of their story on with images to help tell the story. They are now recording themselves reading the stories with correct Latin pronunciation.

A Story about Rufus and Alma

I created a similar story, this time with the assistance of my 3 and 5 year old daughters. The girls sat in my lap one afternoon and helped me write a story slideshow using SMART Notebook. I uploaded the slideshow to VoiceThread. Then my older daughter read the story aloud. She’s just starting to read, so she was very proud that she could read the whole thing. Younger students could create their own stories, or each student could create a single page. Illustrations could be scanned in and the students could narrate or describe their pictures. VoiceThread has an educator option, which helps provide a safe and secure platform for students of all ages.

Three Lonely Dinosaurs

Mrs. Dion’s Spanish students practice describing themselves. They brought in pictures of themselves as babies and Mrs. Dion created the slideshow for the class. All the students wrote a descriptions of themselves in Spanish without sharing their names. Classmates then commented on each slide, guessing who was in the picture based on the description. In a similar activity, each student created an autobiography slideshow. They shared pictures and wrote about their life in Spanish. Students then uploaded their presentation and recorded their autobiography in the target language.

Baby Pictures

Autobiografia

In another Spanish lesson, Mrs. Dion’s students each created a complete VoiceThread presentation. In a lesson on body parts and illnesses, students had to talk about how to get into shape. The students were instructed to describe what happened during a full week of trying new fitness routines: each day they suffered another injury to some part of their body. By the end of the week, the students were completely incapacitated! Students took their own photographs and narrated their mishaps, all in Spanish.

Body and Health Project

Another Spanish teacher, Mr. Michael Springer, is using VoiceThread with his upper level Spanish students to investigate Spanish art history.  Students were to find an image of a piece of art and commented on their slide in Spanish. This is a good example of an activity that transfers well to any subject that would require commenting on an image or picture – art history, geography, geometry, history, and biology all come to mind as subjects where this activity would be meaningful. At The Professional Learner Profe Springer shares his Lessons from a VoiceThread Project.

Our Advanced Placement teachers were discussing the need to encourage more conversations in the target languages. On the Spanish AP exam, students are required to listen to a short conversation and respond. We brainstormed the following activity. Students find an image that will inspire conversation (e.g. someone looking at a broken window, someone looking over a cliff). Two students are assigned the picture and must develop a conversation inspired by the image. The images are uploaded to VoiceThread and the teams record their conversation as comments. The rest of the class then listens to the other conversations and responds to what they’ve heard by recording their own comments. This recreates the activity on the AP test while giving the students creative in-put to how they develop the conversations.

But VoiceThread is not only for Foreign Language teachers. Browse the VoiceThread site and you will find projects created for Art History, Language Arts, Science, Math, Biology. Remember that there are educator accounts available for teachers which allow teachers of all grade levels to take advantage of this great tool while respecting the privacy of their students.

Tom Barrett has created a great resource, 17 Useful Ways to Use VoiceThread in the Classroom. Check out his ideas and be sure to send him ideas that you develop for your own classes.

MindMeister has a VoiceThread in Education mind map that offers suggestions for how to use VoiceThread for class projects and more.

Please visit TeacherTech 21st Century, a wiki where we share our presentation from the MassCUE Conference.

UPDATE:

One excellent result of attending workshops such as MassCUE is meeting people who use the same tools and hearing what they do with their students. I just met Mr. Greg Kulowiec from Plymouth High School and The History 2.0 Classroom. He presented on VoiceThread at the MassCUE Conference in 2008; he suggested I search for his projects and his students’ work. Here are some examples of what he does:

U.S. History Honors class Impressions of Slavery

Weighted Average Word Problem

U.S. History Honors Should Jackson be on the $20

He also made a great (and perhaps obvious) suggestion that I search for samples in other subjects.

For Math:

The Math Lessons for 9-25-08 by Ms. Colville

For Science (short but effective):

The Carbon Cycle (4th Period) by Mary Ellsworth

The Power of Twitter

Today I’m at the MassCUE Conference at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. It was exciting to pull into the parking lot this morning and come up to the Fidelity Investments Clubhouse. As I listen to the keynote address I can look out the window and see the field where the Patriots play. Throughout the day I’ll be attending workshops and tweeting and sharing what I’m learning.

Later this afternoon Liz B. Davis and I are presenting “Establishing a Learning Network Using Twitter” in Theater A. We will be sharing tips for getting started with Twitter and for using Twitter to powerfully build a network of educators and colleagues globally. Establishing a Learning Network with Twitter is a wiki where we share links and resources for using Twitter to build a network.

MassCUE excitement!

It’s much too late on a Tuesday night, but I’ve been Skyping and collaborating and chatting with colleagues about the MassCUE Conference tomorrow at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts. I’m thrilled to have the opportunity to present some of my experiences and what I’ve learned. I’m even more excited to learn more and touch base with some amazing educators. Keep an eye on Twitter, check in soon here. I’m looking forward to tweeting and blogging and keeping an active backchannel for all of the workshops I attend!

Google Docs in use

Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on culture and language projects with all of my classes. Each class had a project that required collaboration, either with a small group or only with me. During the research part of the project, all of the groups created Google Docs to collaborate and share what they found. As the projects became more focused, many students started to use a bibliography generator, such as EasyBib, to keep track of their resources and images. For the final phase of the project, students created presentations using Google Presentations. All of these tools are free, all require no storage space on a network, flashdrive, or hard drive.

What I found to be most valuable about using these tools with my students was that I could “conference” with students about their work and research on my own time. Several days each week I need to rush home to pick up my girls from school right away. During each class period, I prefer to keep all of my students focused and working, so conferencing with small groups ends up being less productive for the groups that I’m not actively engaged with. And despite my best efforts, there always seems to be one group that doesn’t get as much time or attention as they needed. With Google Docs I logged on each evening and checked on their progress. If one group didn’t seem to be moving ahead, I could e-mail them to keep them on track. I could offer tips on where to go next and offer links to useful websites.

When my Latin students were writing a story in Latin, I highlighted the text and color coded the notes to indicate what they needed to focus on. For example, when the verb endings needed revision, I highlighted those words in yellow; blue was for noun endings. When the final document no longer had highlights, the students knew they had made the proper corrections. Google Docs also allowed me to keep track of the revision history, to see who was contributing and when. One young lady, who had been complaining about exhaustion, seemed to be editing only between 1 and 3 a.m. This gave me an opportunity to talk to her, not just about the project, but the issues that seemed to be getting in the way of her learning in all of her classes.

In Google Presentation, I could see where the students were going with their slideshows and offer assistance with layout and formatting. When one group had a significant download issue (a lovely slideshow wouldn’t download in any format), I was able to troubleshoot the problem over the weekend while my daughter napped. This wasn’t an issue I would’ve expected a group of high school students  to be able to work out on their own and the students might have thought that they had to start over. At the same time, I hadn’t been able to find time to troubleshoot the issue when I wasn’t rushing between classes or trying to meet the immediate needs of a class full of students.

This past Friday most of the projects were due at the beginning of class. I hadn’t required that all of the final projects be in a Google format. I figured that some students would be able to do more with PowerPoint or might have trouble accessing the internet from home. What struck me, though, was that of the students who didn’t manage to meet the Friday deadline, 9 of the 14 had not used Google Presentation or Google Docs for the final product. The remaining 5 students had been out with the flu immediately before the deadline.  The reasons for missing the deadline included forgetting their flashdrive (2 students), running out of ink in the printer, e-mailing the slideshow to an account that can’t be opened at school, and saving it on a computer that they didn’t have access to except during occasional study halls. Two students e-mailed their presentation to me, but did not type the correct e-mail address. One student created his PowerPoint on a Mac but didn’t save the images along with the presentation; when he tried to open the file on my PC the images weren’t there. ALL of the issues would’ve been addressed, if not solved, by collaborating with me using a Google platform.

The lesson I’m learning is that Web 2.0 tools such as Google Docs can facilitate learning in a more meaningful way than the old fashioned red pen and paper. After all, no one has to keep track of that page of notes that I hand wrote. No one has to look through the crumpled papers shoved in the bottom of a backpack or locker. No one has to decipher messy handwriting (mine or theirs). All of the editors (students and teacher) can see the notes. All of the editors can follow the history of a document – from any computer that has internet.  Special education liaisons can be brought into the conversation to provide support.

So why don’t I do this all the time? Because there are too many limitations of time and space for computer labs and technology available to all students. Until students can rely on using computers in class each day, I can’t expect that they’ll do all of their work on-line. I would love to move to a paperless classroom. But there are already those among the faculty who complain that some teachers are using the limited computer lab space more than is fair. I am looking into getting a grant to purchase a classroom set of laptops or netbooks. At the same time, the school administration needs to promote this kind of learning, IT needs to be open to allowing students access to wi-fi in class, parents and students need to see that meaningful learning does not always require paper and books.

Playing with avatars

My five year old daughter loves to play with my computer. I try to keep her on the machine set up with kids’ games and links preset to sites that are Mom-approved. But often she’ll look over my shoulder and ask to feed the fish on my iGoogle home page.  The other day she told me she didn’t like the picture that I use on Twitter. Today, though, she did approve of another avatar that I’m using for this blog, VoiceThread, and other sites. I showed her a few others I had made – for a friend, for my husband – and fairly quickly she identified each person. When she asked if we could make one for her, I thought it would be fun, not to mention interesting to see how a 5 year old imagines herself.

Avatars are a good way for students to create an image of themselves without sharing personal photos.  The avatar maker that I like is called FaceYourManga. It allows you to change specific features and, even with somewhat limited options, seems to get the key elements that make a person identifiable to family and friends. The one critique I had for this avatar maker was that the bodies were really designed for adults and I was very clear that I would not create an image of my daughter that had the figure of an adult woman. It is somewhat hard to avoid, but I think we did o.k.

Need to know

Over the past few years I’ve noticed that more and more of my students are struggling with issues that reach far beyond the classroom. I know that I’ve become more aware of my students and I’ve tried to connect more with each student over the year. It is a challenge to really get to know kids when I typically have between 75 and 100 students on my roster – and I’m lucky to have small class sizes. Each class meets for less than an hour each day. That’s not that much time to get to know so many students and to teach them Latin.

At the beginning of each year my mailbox is filled with folders sharing IEPs and 504s and other education plans that keep me informed of diagnosed learning disabilities and other issues that might impact each students learning. I also make sure to keep track of the list of illnesses and allergies that the school nurse shares with teachers. I’m aware of who carries an epipen in case of bee sting and who is allergic to milk or nuts or shellfish. This confidential information helps me get a better idea of who each student is, and perhaps what issues he/she deals with outside of my classroom. I only have food in my classroom on rare occasions, so the food allergies don’t seem to come up much for me. All of this information helps me provide accommodations and establish a safe classroom setting to help all of my students have success.

Yet each year I stumble across information that I really wish I had known much earlier. And sometimes the information we get isn’t the information we need. Parents and students often keep information from teachers either because they don’t think it is relevant to the classroom setting or perhaps they wish to keep certain medical issue private. I understand the instinct to keep social and emotional issues separate from school, yet so often those are the issues that impact a student’s ability to focus and learn. This week a young woman in my class told me that she had trouble staying awake in my class because her Prozac kept her up at night and left her drowsy all day. If she hadn’t felt comfortable sharing that with me, I might never have known. Yet this is exactly the kind of feedback that a parent or doctor should hear. Another student shared with me that his prescriptions (for ADHD) hadn’t been working for him last spring. He was drinking an energy drink when he came into my room and could barely stay in his seat the rest of his period. Shortly afterward he went into rehab to deal with drug and emotional issues. Again, I would never know about his struggles if that student hadn’t felt safe sharing that information with me.

Parents and students have a right to keep information private, this I know. But a teacher can’t meet the needs of a student without having all the facts. It is as important for me to know about a student’s struggle with depression as it is to be aware of a life-threatening nut allergy. When a student is fighting drug dependency, a teacher will see him every day, more regularly than a parent or a therapist. Please, parents, share this information with the adults who can make a positive difference in your child’s life.