"10 Years Ago, I Created a CD..." said a teacher.

I have been mulling over something that a teacher said to me last week as we began a project, and I just can't get it out of my head! This great teacher (I am not being sarcastic...he is a wonderful teacher) said, "Jen, can you find the civil war music we put on CDs ten years ago so the kids can put them into their iMovie projects?"

I, of course went digging around in our computer lab cabinets and found the pile of CDs, but as I was digging for the music, I thought about what that means for this teachers' curriculum and how he integrates technology. What it means to the students experiences and engagement in my school and how technology is used in the curriculum.

I have been working with teachers to think about their curriculum, the tools we have available to us and the way that they design the learning in their classrooms. There are some, like this great teacher, who use technology for specific parts of the curriculum and do the same project year after year. 

The idea that in May, we make a Civil Rights movie with music of the time, images taken from a Google image search and then put into iMovie with full sentence descriptors scrolling over the images, prevails, even today! 

I have been assisting with this teacher on this project, and don't get me wrong, the students are engaged. They are collecting facts, searching for images on google and then going to YouTube and selecting background music for their projects. 

I am struggling with this type of technology use in the classroom for a number of reasons.

1.  The teacher comes up with the essential questions.

2.  The students collect facts and retell the facts without creating anything new from the facts they have learned.

3. The production of the movie takes 10 days for 30-40 minutes a day!

4. The students are grabbing audio and images from the web without any regard for copyright.

5. The students are checking off each item on the rubric as they create.

6. The students don't have a choice of product. Everyone makes a movie.

7. The students watch 6-8 final projects in class, on the same subject, often with the same facts explained.

I love that the students are engaged, and they are collaborating, but oh my! there is a lot of room for improvement in this instructional design!
My job as the technology facilitator is to work with the teachers to change, evolve and look at their curriculum as a changing, fluid program.

This great teacher and I are going to be working very closely next year, as I implement my, "Adopt a Teacher" program (described on my blog last week). We will look at the design of the lesson, and hopefully, shift the question generating to the students. Then, I will recommend that the students are offered choices of final products. While the curriculum unit is going on, we will look at copyright laws, and certainly, the students will be encouraged to use EasyBib (which can easily be saved into GoogleDrive with one click sign in)

to create a bibliography. In addition, the National Library of Congress has an amazing selection of primary sourced images, music, interviews, etc. available. The resources are so much richer than using Google Image searches. I use any opportunity to showcase this great resource to kids! Finally, the students will be given the learning standards instead of a rubric, and then encouraged to grade themselves based on the learning standards. Each group will generate 3-5 higher level questions that can be answered by others as they review their learning product. The end products will be shared on a social media site like Edmodo, and then the students will be asked to review the final projects outside of class.

Students will post their comments and reviews on Edmodo. 

 When I think about my teaching style, I find it amazing, that each May for 10 years, that someone would be teaching the same topic in the same way.
I guess, I am looking for other ways to encourage this great teacher to look at his "May Civil Right Movie Project" and transform it into a more student focused blended learning lesson.
Reach out to me @jmaclaurin on Twitter with your ideas.

PLAYDATE13

Today, I went to the first ever PLAYDATE13 conference. PLAYDATE13 was conceived by teachers because they wanted time to learn, practice and discover new technology to use in school, without all the sitting and just listening part of conferences. Imagine, time to play with the tool as you are introduced to it! It was invigorating!

We gathered at National Teacher's Academy in Chicago. Registrants were told to register for certain sessions based on interest, then asked to explore and download all the tools before the conference. Then today, we gathered in sessions, were briefly introduced to the tools, then we played with the tools. We talked about the application of the tools and where and when it could be used. It was great to have the time to play with the tech right then as you heard about it.

Top Take Aways

 1. Threering.com  A digital portfolio for teachers. A place to showcase student work and what is going on in your classroom. Blog like, with a vertical feel, with spaces for comments. It could handle images, files, audio, everything but links. So, pretty cool. Plus it was lighting fast, and the  app for the iPhone and iPad was great too!

2. Schoology.com    Pronounced "School- ogy". Edmodo like, but so much more powerful in the way it deals with student work that is turned into teachers. Teachers can scroll through student work, with the whole class in one window and comment on it on the right hand side of the screen. It is just a more advanced classroom management system.

3. Paperport Notes App   First, its free! Bring in documents of any kind into the notebook, students can annotated it with text, audio or post it notes. It can be drawn on, highlighted and then emailed. Like GoodReader but better!




4. Subtext App  Also free! Bring anything into subtext, especially webpages, online articles or whatever text, and it strips down the graphics and images, and makes the text into a digital book. It reads like an ebook. I need to play with this one more, but it seems like it would be very powerful for close reading of articles that are online.

5. Doctopus   A script that is run inside Google Apps for Education that allows teachers to assign documents to small groups, large groups, individuals all without going through the tedium of sharing with each student. A super time saver...but complicated! I have NOT mastered this one, but I am determined to figure it out. I am sure it will be a super time saver for sharing documents in our middle school.

Here is the link to the PLAYDATE13 resource page. It has all the tools that were explored today in Chicago and Portland, Oregon and will also include Boston after their conference on March 16th.