#NaNoWriMo 2012 Reflection

Posted on December 1, 2012 by

It’s done.

Well, almost done…

in 95 minutes national novel writing month ends & thne I need to return to using proper grammer, spacing, and such

It’s been a great month. I wish I would have stuck to my goal. The first eight days of the month, I woke up at 4:30am. My goal was to wake up that early every day (failed greatly).  After eight days, I had put out 43,000+ words. Once I hit 50,000 words, I lost all motivation to keep writing at such a pace.

Enough about me, let’s talk about the students!

As the picture below indicates, a group of twelve-ish students is closing in on 300,000 words! We had fifteen writeshops of ninety minutes, all held right at our school. The students organized a half dozen write-ins at coffee shops in Green Bay. And this evening, we are having an eight hour write-in at our school to end the adventure.

I had to throw on my headphones and crank out this blog post. The delirious laughter of overtired adolescent students and the smell of burnt frozen pizza is a sign the writing is starting to fade for most. It’s also a sign the community is stronger.

The kids are taking charge.

I’m not sure what #NaNoWriMo is, even though I’ve gone through it twice now. But what I’m sure of is there is a bit of magic in a group of people taking off on a month long question.

I am so proud of my students.

I will do this again next year (but not the 8-hour write-in at school at the end of a 50 hour work week, that’s is not smart. I am writing this not to myself so other keep me accountable….:)

On a side note, I write this post with my niece just twelve feet behind me. She’s closing in on her goal. She’s been counting out loud her goal. “Just five hundred more words!” And each time she says how far she has to go, the rest of the group cheers her on. My niece took a leap. Not only did she join a group of complete strangers, but she drove two hours to come to this write-in today.  The community of learners took her right in. I know I’ve acted annoyed at all of the Dr. Who references and rolled my eyes at Emilie Autumn’s electric violin, but I am so happy to be an annoyed teacher right now and I am so proud of  the young woman Moira is turning out to be.

-Michael

Screen Shot 2012-11-30 at 10.28.14 PM

Posted in Reflection, Teaching | Leave a comment

Apologies – #NaNoWriMo

Posted on November 1, 2012 by

It’s been less than 2 hours…

And already, I feel a need to apologize.

I apologize first and foremost to my family. There’s guaranteed to be water cups in the bathroom. Possibly half drank coffee cups by the bed, and maybe even empty Starbucks cups in the diaper bag.

I apologize to my colleagues. I’m trying to listen to the words that are coming out of your mouth, but I’m trying to think about bringing more action into the life of my protagonist.

Finally, I’d like to apologize to my body. Yes, I sacrificed breakfast this morning for 300 hundred words, and that’s just the beginning. Sorry for not giving you more sleep. Apologies for the copious caffeine.   To my waistline, I’m sorry, and I’m not quite sure what direction you’re going in. But based on last year, you’re probably going the wrong direction. To my tie collection, know that when December rolls around, you will once again be prepped with the proper shirt the night before, but for now, for November, you will go with whatever does not need to be ironed and smells clean.

Noveling has begun.

 

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Sunday Night Prep – Experience Week/Discovery Session

Posted on October 29, 2012 by

“Now I really want to _________.” Enter: start a debate team, make a guitar, go to UW-Madison, make calzones for my family, plan a vacation, learn more about community gardening, design video games, go out and buy an African drum.

This past week, was Experience Week at the school I teach at. Experience Week is common at many experiential or project-based learning (PBL) schools. Essentially, a few times throughout the year, the traditional school schedule is scrapped and alternate planned activities are “experienced” by students. These activities are planned by staff, and at some schools the students.  The purpose of Experience Week is to have students opened up to activities they otherwise would not encounter. The hope, is that Experience Week leads to richer future learning opportunities.

In order to make Experience Week possible, a few key elements are necessary. They are:
1.  Control over school calendar & school day – In order to have students out and about in the local community or anywhere within 500 miles, the first critical piece is to allow the folks running the school to control the school calendar and school day. Without those two critical elements, read no further, because Experience Week cannot exist.

2. A budget – Bringing in experts, traveling to new places, these activities obviously cost money. Many activities can be planned for no and low cost, but a budget is still necessary to pull off this week.

3. Passionate students – In my opinion, even if a staff has control over the calendar, school day, and budget, the next critical area is having students open to learning new things. The terms I’ve been using of late to describe students who have little to no interest in school are, “Turned off,” and “Asleep” as in, the lights are off and nobody is home. I believe all students can be awoken. And Experience Week can be a great way to light the fire in students. But if a student would rather do worksheets than engage in hands-on learning activities, then that student may struggle with going out into the community and geocaching in small groups or resist working a shift at the local soup kitchen. More than a budget, more than control over schedule, having students who want to learn and “be a part of” is critical.

4. Planning time - If best practices existed for Experience Weeks, I would have half of the staff leading the entire week, while the other half of the staff plans out the next Experience Week. I cannot stress enough how crucial planning is to a week full of activities, varied lunch schedules, bus pickups, etc. This is something I’d like to get to at my school. While three staff are leading one week, three other staff members are planning out the week at the end of the next project cycle. I love Experience Week, it is truly exhausting. After each Experience Week, I have greater respect for elementary school teachers. Now I know what it’s like to have students and be responsible for them 100% of every minute of every day.

This will probably be my last blog post until December rolls around. With #NaNoWriMo starting this week, I will be putting off Sunday Night Preps for awhile. In order to write 50,000 words in 30 days, I’ll need to push out 1,667 words each day (so will the other 300,000 people world wide who are on the same quest). Hopefully by December, I’ll have a complete design of what I’m calling Discovery Week. Over the last few years, Dan Pink, Sir Ken Robinson, and the scholars at GLS have dropped a ton of knowledge about the importance of play. In planning Experience Week activities, I’ve thought of including game design using ARIS or Gamestarmechanic, but these activities are more likely to lead to deeper learning if people had between a week to ten days to dive into them. My school that I’m teaching at has developed a connection with a local wildlife reserve. One of my colleagues and I were in a heated discussion about how students can become linked with the local wildlife reserve. “They need to get out there,” Master Lee said, “Sitting with their netbooks in their hand all day is not PBL.” The guy I’m referring to is truly wise. He’s twice my age. The statements that come out of his mouth usually take me about a day to process and grasp. A full day later, I said to the Master Lee, “What if we just send kids out to the wildlife reserve for a week or two? If they were there for at least 3-hours per day, and if we gave them a process to go through, they’d discover their next project idea.”

“That’s a great idea.” Said Master Lee.

That’s your idea from yesterday translated so an eight year old could grasp it, is what I thought. “Thanks.” Is what I said.

Here’s what I’m working on in my design journal, and what I hope to bring to life via Google Doc over the next six to eight weeks:

Academic School year = 40 weeks; 3 12-week sessions with the following Project Cycles:

12-week Project Cycle

6-week Project Cycle, 6-week Project Cycle

4-week Project Cycle, Discovery Session, 4-week Project Cycle

What if, there were three 12-week sessions in a school year. Within each of those three 12-week sessions there were three different project cycles for students to report out their  learning. At the end of the 12-week session, students would have an Experience Week. There would also be a week in the fall and a week in the spring for standardized testing. By chunking the standardized testing into week long blocks, fewer days would be consumed with awkward scheduling. The downside is that students would be taking multiple tests within the same week (WKCE & MAPs may not even have the same testing windows, in which case, this design would not be possible). The secondary goal of separating standardized testing from the 12-week sessions is to have a clear separation between learning and testing. I think this would be incredibly beneficial to the school culture.

Here’s a snapshot of a single 12-week session for the fall 2013-14 school year.

Week 1 – Orientation, passion workshops, project process overview, Proposal Meetings
Week 2 – Research & Design
Week 3 – Research & Design
Week 4 - School Wide Presentations for 4-week cycle; Assessment Meetings for 6-week cycle
Week 5 – Discovery Session 4-week cycle begins
Week 6 - School Wide Presentations for 6-week cycle; Assessment Meetings for 6-week cycle
Week 7 – Second 4-week cycle begins; Second 6-week cycle begins
Week 8 – Research & Design
Week 9 – Research & Design
Week 10 – School Wide Presentations for 12-week cycle; Assessment Meetings 4-week cycle
Week 11 – Assessment Week for all three project cycles; Product Deadline for all project cycles
Week 12 – Event Night (student’s display learning to entire community); Celebration of Learning; Student Led Conferences
Experience Week
State Testing Week
Fall Break Week

To clarify a few things…

Over the last three school years, I’ve been facilitating PBL in three very different settings, under three very different project cycles. Project-Based Learning is somewhat of a “catchall” and I want to try to codify the “catchall.” I know much of what I write is rough and loose, but I keep thinking of something I read from a fantastic blog last year:

“Additionally, project-based learning reinforces the artificial idea that meaningful impact can occur in a tremendously short time-frame – often as little as three or four weeks.” (http://www.ac4d.com/2011/08/17/teaching-social-innovation/)

I believe outstanding projects can be completed in four weeks time. But I also believe it takes up to 12 weeks just to plan the design of some projects. Here’s two quick examples. A student can doing a project on the History of Nintendo can complete the entire project in just four weeks. In a 4-week period, that student could propose their project plan, carry out research on the company, and put together a product. The student could also report out their learning to the people they proposed their project to and to their school community. It’s a pretty straight forward 40 – 60 hour project. The student could probably earn credit/badge in History, Media Arts, English/Language Arts, and possibly Computer Science. The second example is a project I have seen proposed at two different schools. If a student wants to create a recording studio at the school, just the design could take up to 12-weeks. This is a 100-200 hour project involving nearly every academic discipline in which high schools record credits. In a multiage ability-diverse learning environment, I believe it’s important for learners to have multiple opportunities to share their learning and move on from one topic to another.

The trick will be in accomplishing everything without the adults having to perform as superhumans to pull off the work.

What’s best for learning? That’s the essential question.

 

Posted in Charter School, Radical School Design, Sunday Night Prep | Leave a comment

Sunday Night Prep – Questions For Reflection

Posted on October 22, 2012 by

I wanted to write about building community through food this evening, but I think I’ll put that post off until the holidays.  For the past two weeks, students at my school have been winding down their first project cycle of the year. Two weeks ago, students presented their projects to their advisory (advisory = 15 multiage high school learners). Last week, students defended their learning to two advisors and facilitated student-led conferences with their families.

It’s been an incredible two weeks. I wanted to take a moment and put in a quick plug for something that gets talked about a whole lot, but is rarely taken apart and defined in its smallest parts. That something is reflection. “I want you to reflect on…” When I hear that, I translate it into, “I want you to shut your mouth now and listen because you couldn’t possibly have the answer to the the current statement I’m making about you.” The other negative connotation regarding reflection my mind jumps to is for the people I’ve come in contact with who seem to be in a permanent state of reflection. These consultants or professors make statements that my head translates to,  ”Reflecting on past reflections have caused me to reflect about the reflecting I needed to do and brought about reflexive consensus making apparent in our team.” I think reflections have gotten a bad rap. Maybe I’m the only one providing reflective writing with undeserved cynicism. Here’s my plug: reflection is awesome.

Reflection leads to improvement.

Reflection which changes future behavior = measurable growth.

Tonight, I want to share with you a work in progress…

I need your help to improve this practice.

Periodically throughout the year, I provide students with a writing prompt, titled, “Question For Reflection.” I know writing prompts are not always in favor. And writing by hand is something that also comes in and out of favor. But my goal with the Question For Reflection activities is to empower students, attempt to find out what adolescents are thinking/feeling, and facilitate a better advisory. At the bottom of this post, you’ll find the Google Folder where I keep the prompts. Harvest away…at the time of this post, four prompts are in the folder. They are:
1. Student Voice
2. Local Community
3. Profession of Choice
4. Leadership
I’m looking to add a few more, and will add prompts to the folder as the need arises.

What’s important about these reflections is that unlike journal entries, I read every one of them. In my advisory, we have have a strict no read policy when it comes to a persons journal. Journals are private. They are not to be read by anyone. To hammer this point home with blunt force, when putting in the practice of journaling, I like to tell my students a story told to me by one of my favorite musicians. My wife and I were at a Ben Folds concert. Prior to him playing his song Trusted, Ben Folds told the audience he divorced his wife for reading his journal. Relaying this story to my students early in the school year seems to set the appropriate boundary I’m aiming for with our journals. Questions For Reflection are different though. The chief difference is that I print off the reflections, hand them to the students, ask them to put their name on it, and then have them turn in the writing when they’re complete. I print off very little paper with my advisory, so when I do bring something, I want them to know it has value and their writing will be read.

I did the Student Voice prompt two weeks ago. I like to do that writing early in the year to see what needs to be done to increase the amount of participation and action in advisory. To walk the talk, I’d like to do my own reflection. As I stated earlier, student presentations were two weeks ago. I shared four takeaways with my advisory. I want to reflect on these four areas in the hope that I’ll get better at preparing students to present their learning.

My four takeaways from student presentations on October 8 – October 12.
1. You are the expert. I am not. Please define technical terms. For six weeks, I watched students enmesh (or at least hopefully engage) in a single topic of study for three hours per day. By the time learners presented their learning to their peers, a language gap existed between the presenter and the audience. Whether the student had dissected and modded a Gameboy, studied Indie Music, assembled a fuzz face clone guitar pedal, or dove into dreaming, these young folks spoke jargon foreign to others. This first project was an “Interest Project;” meaning, students were studying a passion or topic that interested them. I think this exacerbated the jargon. I was shocked at the technical language used by students in their presentations. When I asked for definitions to the terms after the students had completed their presentations, they were able to define the terms. Going forward, I need to have students outline their technical terms somehow. That way, they won’t lose their audience (but maybe I was the only one lost and this is just me being selfish).

2.Work hard to connect with the audience. During presentation week, we watched Amy Cuddy’s Your body language shapes who you are TED Talk. Not only is this talk powerful, but it really works. But hearing about becoming a powerful force for presentations and being that powerful force are going to take many many more repetitions. I wonder, how many PowerPoints have my seventeen year old students received over their years of schooling? Are they carrying out the same behavior that was modeled to them? Do they realize that teachers have been connecting with them every day? Maybe I need to phrase connecting with audience as having students visualize the best teacher, preacher, or other performer they’ve ever encountered. This is an area I’d like to see growth in during the next project cycle. Student presentations should be awesome! They should be exciting, informative, and hopefully entertaining. I need to keep looking for ways to have students connect with their audience.

3.Teach us. Please. Teach us what you learned. Connect your amazing learning with our lives and teach us why all the things you learned matter. This is one of the coolest potential opportunities of a project-based learning school. Students develop expertise and share their powers with other students. We’re a young pbl school. We’re not to the point where students are providing 3-5 minute demonstrations and in-depth half day long workshops. We’re not there yet, but we will be.

4.Create with Youtube. Youtube is underutilized. In my district, as in many districts, Youtube is blocked for student use. Youtube, just as Pinterest, Facebook, and countless other creative sites are filtered & off limits to students at school. The students who did the projects which required deconstruction and step-by-step DIY (Do-It-Yourself) hacking used Youtube. But I didn’t see the students participating in this forum. They did not post videos. They did not comment on videos. They did not site Youtube videos in their sources. If we’re going to be a dynamic PBL school, we have to leverage Youtube better. It might mean sending students to the local library to access the service. Students need to access the sites where the experts post content, and right now, the biggest site outside of Google is Google’s Youtube. What’s more, many of my students did not think they could use a video gleamed from Youtube in their sources. Youtube is a great place to have young learners launch their folksonomy.

There’s my brief plug for reflection and my brief reflection. Next week, I’ll dive into Making a Case For Experience Week & The Elementary Design of Discovery Week.

Google Folder of Reflection Prompts

Question for Reflection Facilitation Notes

(There’s a likely chance that I stole the Question for Reflection verbiage off the Internet within the last year. If so, please let me know who coined the phrase. Thanks for the read:)

Posted in Sunday Night Prep | 5 Comments

Sunday Night Prep – #NaNoWriMo

Posted on October 16, 2012 by

It’s Monday. For the first time this school year, I missed a self-imposed deadline. My Sunday Night Prep series is going to be at least one day late. By the time I finish writing this post, it might be two or three days overdue. It’s a good thing I am a solo act on this learning space.

Last year, I started off on an unplanned adventure. I wasn’t very good at planning lessons, and most of my ideas were just that- big ideas. But I was fortunate enough to work side-by-side two curriculum guru’s and lesson planning wonks. Through their steady guidance, I learned to craft lessons and expand ideas into units. The format for this syllabus comes from Josh Zimmers. Hire him if you have any educational consulting needs. He gets great things done! I saw Matt Cutts TED Talk in the Spring of 2011. In it, he talks about really cool month long adventures people can go on to change their lives. One adventure is to write a novel in a month. That’s right, a 50,000 word, real deal novel in a month. Little did I know the background or cult/community surrounding National Novel Writing Month, abbreviated NaNoWriMo and hashtagged #NaNoWriMo on Twitter.

The start of last school year was furious. Opening a charter school is pure insanity. Needless to say, my planning for a #NaNoWriMo seminar last year was incomplete at best. I showed up with energy and big ideas. The students really did the work. Two of the eleven students actually finished an entire 50,000 word novel. Eleven eighth grade girls volunteered for the month long project. The word count ranged from 1,500 words to 55,000. What I didn’t plan for, was the actual writing that I needed to do to participate. Writing 1,667 words per day takes time. This was an independent project; meaning, I got the group of writers together at the beginning and turned the entire project over to the individual students. One student who had done the challenge before emerged as the leader for the entire school. I didn’t do a good job of building community. I did an even poorer job of celebrating milestones and tracking student progress. My highlight of #NaNoWriMo 2011 was a student organized write-in held at our school. A half dozen writers from the Fox Valley community came to the school on a Sunday night to write. It was awesome to see the students work turn into something positive for the school and community.

That was last year.

I finished my novel.

I killed the matriarch at the 50,200 word mark.

I had to be done.

This year is different.

I’ve been planning since mid-July. I’ve been harvesting like crazy (harvesting = teachers stealing freely from each other to improve practice. I first heard this term from Peter Wieczorek, Director of Northwest Passage High School in Coon Rapids, MN. I’ve harvested the term). I actually like the syllabus I’ve put together. Please harvest away. Two weeks from today, we’ll begin. I’ll be facilitating this seminar. We have a node created on the Young Writer’s Program of the NaNoWriMo website.  Over the next few days, I’ll be cleaning up the class page and my site profile. Anyone in the world is invited to join this seminar. If you want to earn 1.0 credit of English, I will gladly add you to our group project on Project Foundry.

Ian Randall Wilson documents a practice he dubs, “Writeshop.” In Writeshop, the emphasis is on writing, just flat out writing. This seminar will have 15 Writeshops over the month. Students are also required to attend at least 3 “write-ins.” Write-ins are evening or weekend writing sessions. They are usually held at coffee shops, libraries, or other cool- chill places. My ulterior motive for having students attend write-ins is to get them out in the community. We as educators need to foster cross-generational relationships and not fear them. Parents of students in the seminar will get a letter home explaining my rationale for requiring write-ins and boiling down the syllabus.

There are two items still fuzzy in regards to #NaNoWriMo this year. They are:
1.Standardized Testing – The WKCE‘s suck. They do not measure learning, but they must be taken. They throw a ginormous wrench into the writing cycle and Writeshops. For four days during the month of November, the entire school schedule is cattywampus to make do with the standardized assessment. We will make it work.

2.Assessment – I want to do a holistic assessment. I want assessment to be a dialog; rather than just informational. I’m not concerned with students improving their grammar or quality of writing (that’s not practical with the month long writing quest); rather, I really really want to assess students perseverance, sticktoitiveness, and ability to support other learners on their quest. Setting an accurate goal during the first week is key. Do students go for the 50,000 word mark when they’ve never written more than a 500 word assignment? Or does the struggling writer plod on to finish their 20,000? If someone has a killer rubric, please share. Otherwise, I’m planning on personalizing assessment and having students blog about their journey. Project Foundry has a beautiful “Project Reflection” metric, and I’m asking students to log time each day.

Do we write together?

Do we get each other better?

Do we create opportunities for learning?

Do we celebrate the small things?

Do we reach our goal?

Those are the larger questions I hope to be a part of.

Currently, I have thirteen students signed up for the seminar. They all attend my school. If  there are others who would like to join (regardless of age); I will open up a course on P2PU, and we’ll get better. My school has a ridiculously expensive Polycon system. We also have two wonderful 27″ iMac’s that are Google Hangoutable. Let’s make this happen!

One other side note: www.nanowrimo.org is awesome! I bought a class set of pins and a poster to chart word counts. Then, the company refunded the $10 I spent for shipping! This is such a cool challenge and I feel gratitude for actually being able to facilitate it again this year. I’m struggling with noveling ideas and characters, but that’s why I’m keeping my design journal close to the hip these days.

Anyone have protagonist names they’d like to share?

Time to harvest…

Posted in Sunday Night Prep | 1 Comment

Sunday Night Prep – The Power of Silence (Quasi-reflection)

Posted on October 8, 2012 by

This past week, something out of the ordinary happened with the group of students I spend 60 minutes with daily. At our small progressive project-based high school, students are in multiage groups of 15. Each group is called an advisory. I am an advisor. And for 45-60 minutes each day, we have Advisory. Advisory, advisor, and Advisory has been in existence for at least 20 years in places such as Minnesota New Country School in Henderson, MN. I see two big purposes for having  time chunked at the beginning and at the end of each day to meet as a multiage group of learners:
1. Build community
2. Develop and strengthen skills key to succeeding in a self-directed learning environment

Our school was set up with Google Apps this week. This was the third time I’d been at a school in which students were introduced to Google Apps. I had previously created a lesson for introducing students to Google Apps. The facilitation notes are below. The more I looked at the lesson plan, the more I realized it was not going to fit the needs of my advisory. Just as I was last year, this year I am fortunate to work with a very talented group of learners. However, the key difference between my advisory at my last school and my current advisory is that my current group of learners has more introverts than extraverts.     With this current group of learners being in just their sixth week of community, I couldn’t see them breaking out into small groups and collectively co-creating a single document- that’s the lesson plan called for.

As the day approached, I began to get nervous. I had a plan, but I didn’t like it. Since I don’t currently have access to editing a school website, when I need to get students to a particular web space, I have them go to a “Today” page on my portfolio. This method has been working well, and made the group run more efficiently than if I would have directed them to individual websites each day.

The day prior to this lesson in Advisory, I had posted the 5-step directions students needed to take to activate their Google Apps accounts. Three of the students in my advisory were successful in getting their accounts turned on. When we walked into Advisory last Wednesday, I asked the three students (dubbed “innovators”) to assist the late adopters and laggards in getting their accounts turned on. They did a great job! While they were assisting the students with activating their accounts. I started listing each students name on a blank Google Doc. The students were listed in order from my left all the way around the circle, ending with the student on my right…let me back up for a moment.

Advisory begins and ends with a circle. We sit in the circle to show the value of each person. When someone speaks, they do not speak to the adult facilitating, rather, the person speaking is addressing the entire group. And the group should respect the person speaking by focusing all of attention to the speaker.

As the last students were activating their Google Apps account, I informed the group we would be going into stealth mode. Stealth mode denotes absolute silence, and that an activity is about to begin which requires the silence of the group in order for the experience to take shape. As we entered stealth mode, students were directed to a Google Doc from the “Today” page. The title of the Google Doc, and also the prompt was, What do you want this advisory to be? The last bit of direction I provided was, “We’ll circle starting with the person on my left. Only one person types at a time.”

My only regret is that I didn’t do a QuickTime Screen Recording of the event. Google could have made a commercial out of it. To me, it was pure magic. The students interacted in a way I had never seen before from my advisory. They put 100% focus not just on the screen, but on the person typing. The sound of the student typing was loud. The reaction of each student to what was typed was palpable. There was a power in the silence.

My father is a Quaker. From the ages of 12 – 22, I went to the Fellowship of Friends a half dozen times with my father. It’s not the religion I practice, but it is something I will always remember and something I want my children to experience. Silence. Grouped silence. To my understanding, many Quaker fellowships run their groups a bit differently. I was twenty years old and a sophomore at UW-Madison. I met my father for breakfast at Mickey’s Dairy Bar and then accompanied him to a “Quaker meeting.” Being Catholic and in my late adolescence, it took me about a half hour to shut my mind off. After awhile, I remember fading into the silence and sitting in the light. To this day, I will never forget what it felt like. The room was rocking. It truly was. The silence was so powerful. 60 minutes of silence.

How much time per day do our students spend in silence?

How about teachers and administrators?

What time does your alarm go off? From the time you wake up in the morning, until your head hits the pillow at night, how many minutes do you experience silence?

This is radically different from 100 years prior, even 70 years prior. My dad’s dad, my grandpa Chet probably spent at least 3-4 hours each day in silence. He farmed. He was a mechanic. He was an inventor. Most days, I may spend just 3-4 minutes in silence. I am a talker. I am working on becoming a better listener. I was glad for the lesson my students showed me this past Wednesday.  I love teaching in a public school. And because I do love teaching in a public school, I won’t be espousing Quaker philosophies and juxtaposing them with my Catholic faith to my students; however, I do need to think deeply about creating rich learning opportunities for my students to experience silence.

 

FACILITATION NOTES which I did not use.

Posted in Reflection, Sunday Night Prep | 2 Comments

Sunday Night Prep – An Introduction To Publishing Material Online

Posted on October 1, 2012 by

Many of our students publish material online well over a hundred times per day; however, I’m not counting every Facebook, tweet, Tumblr, or Pinterest post as publishing material.

I’ve been fascinated by the pieces students create in their free time. Every year, I’m shocked by an unsuspected fan fiction novelist, poet, or song writer. What shocks me even more is that many of these students are quite hesitant to publish their material online. I see many benefits to having students publish their created work online. Namely:
1. Students gain skills – publishing to online sites requires navigating through hoops and following particular guidelines.
2. Students gain confidence – each time a page view happens on their work, or someone “likes” what they posted, student gain more confidence.
3. Students gain awareness – their published work can be read by anyone at anytime. This is far different from turning in a five page personal narrative to their English 10 teacher and only having one person inform them about their writing skills.
4. Students become curious – publishing a presentation can lead to tinkering with Blogger, which can lead to diving into WordPress. A little bit of nudging can go long way. Many of these site are full of great material in a wide range of areas. Getting students to these sites will open them up to whatever they’re passionate about.
5. Students get connected and authentic learning occurs - it’s a giantly connected world. Many of my students have never been outside of Wisconsin. I once had a class blog where students posted their summative responses to books they finished. When a blogger from the Philippines followed our blog, it led to two day adventure of geography and authors.

As with any web tool, it’s important to go over in detail with your students about using common sense and staying safe. The sites listed below are less than 1/10 of 1% of the publishing site available, but they are the sites I am most comfortable with and have been using with my students since 2009ish. One mistake I’ve made in the past with this lesson is forgetting the minimum age limit to create an account. Not all of the sites have the same minimum age requirement. When in doubt, don’t have students create an account, they can lurk (with your supervision), and can go home and have a discussion about the site with their parent/guardian.

Wattpad – This is an outstanding community of writers who fervently support each other. If you have a student who really has a passion to write, Wattpad is a great place to send them. What I like about Wattpad is the ease of following students. As with many of the sites I’ve listed, Wattpad will send emails when new work is published.
ScribD – This is a great Catchall  site. For students who publish a wide range of things from recipes to tutorials, this site is a great place to post everything.
Slideshare.net - most awesome presentation hub ever! A great site to post presentations. What I really like about Slideshare.net is all of the embedding features for the slideshows. Slideshare is super easy to upload and has a very slick slideviewer. It’s also integrated with Google Apps. I’ve heard great things about Sliderocket as well, but I’ve been a bit of a laggard in getting around to explore that site.
Issuu - turns any .pdf into a magazine. This site is very intuitive and I’ve had great luck with tech-resistant students diving into Issuu and creating gems.
Lulu - have a book you want to print and have it sit on your coffee table? Lulu offers really good educator discounts. For any project-based school, having student created books are awesome for project presentation nights. Students love to hold books they’ve created!
Blurb - this one is brand new to me as of last week. One of my students is doing a project on tattoo’s and is creating an incredible book with this site.
Shutterfly – a favorite in my household. What’s really cool about Shutterfly is that books can be created right out of iPhoto, and the created books can be embedded into a website.  Shutterfly seems a bit more adultish than some of the other sites I’ve listed, but I absolutely love this site and have been impressed with the products we’ve created and ordered.

The list goes on…and on…when I’m doing this lesson with students, I like to start with an overview of at least three of the sites, and then let students explore one of the sites for 15 minutes or so. I like to have students report back what they found, and talk about what sites they would use in the future. It’s interesting to see what students gravitate towards specific publishing sites. If you’re reading this, and you know of other great online publishing sites, please post them in the comments.

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HAVE A GREAT WEEK!

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