Paris, Future Music Therapist

I met Paris in August 2006. She was in seventh grade. I was new to the school, and she and her classmates helped me make it through my first year in junior high.

Paris is now on her way to college to study music therapy. She has many talents, one of the best being her ability to make people feel welcome, special and loved. She will be an incredible therapist some day!

She has applied for a music scholarship by singing the national anthem “by the dawn’s early light.” As Joy Kirr pointed out to me, you can even hear the crickets chirping.

Will you help Paris win the scholarship by voting for her?

You can vote once a day with each email address you have until August 24. Thanks so much for helping making a special young woman’s dream come true!

Just click on the link (or watch the video here if it’s available.)
http://www.fmccrop.com/grower/Anthem-Singing-Contest.aspx?vkey=VGnC2fQT

A Need for Researcher’s Workshop

Come with me to genius hour last week. Here is the scenario I came upon.

Two students and two computers – one working on an iMovie, one looking up information. On the iMovie, they were adding slides that asked interesting questions about Camaros. When I arrived, the question on the iMovie screen was: What is the Camaro’s body made of?

On the other computer, the “researcher” had typed in this question in a Google search: “What are car bodies made of?” He clicked on the first link and got to this site:

He began reading/summarizing aloud, “Car bodies ‘…are made out of sheet metal (steel)…’ Yep, they are made out of steel.” The iMovie guy began typing.

Hmmm…I saw many things wrong here, and I couldn’t stay quiet very long. When I saw that he didn’t even finish reading the first paragraph, I stepped in. “What else are they made of, according to this source?” I asked, pointing to the screen.

Based on that first paragraph, car bodies could be made of steel, aluminum, a variety of mixtures of those, carbon-fiber, or fiber glass.

I also pointed out the difference in the two questions on the two computers. One asked about Camaros and the other about cars in general. Do you know the answer to your question yet?

I stayed with them awhile, not wanting to stifle their enthusiasm, but I also wanted to see how they chose their sources, and which ones they liked. The way they were searching by question reminded me of the olden days when we used the then cutting-edge “Ask Jeeves” search engine. We would type in a question, and a nice butler would magically send you to the answer. (Now it’s at Ask.com)

Search engines and Q & A sites have continually developed over the past decade. The “answers” they give, as well as the pool of contributors doing the answering, have grown exponentially in that time. Maybe, I thought, I need to teach students a different way of searching than I used in the 90s.

When the Camaro boys typed the question in a Google search, they were given many answers to choose from — with a great range in the quality of the answers. You can see them here: wiki.answers.com, answers.Yahoo.com, and the Q&A Community of Ask.com, and eHow.com

Although it didn’t come up in a search for this question, another site they said they like to use is Answers.com. (Tell me, do people still think Wikipedia is an unreliable source?)

As I finished up with these boys, I was struck with some things I have not been paying enough attention to. I need to directly teach more about researching, especially online. In addition, I took away some more advice to self:

  1. Teach critical reading. It’s more important now than ever.
  2. Figure out how I decide if a site is reliable. And how do I teach that to seventh graders?
  3. Encourage the good questioning that was going on, but help students learn to be unsatisfied with shallow answers plucked out of their reading.

This happened a week ago Wednesday. The same evening I participated in #geniushour chat, where I heard about something new: researcher’s workshop. I didn’t get the details, but I imagined that it was a cross between genius hour and an assigned research paper.

After seeing the Camaro research, and other similar researching events during genius hour and my science and history classes, I need to do more research and find out more about research workshop.

This week, we just finished an experimental version of the researcher’s workshop in history. (I’ll write about my attempt this week in a later post, but before they started I gave them the advice in the picture below.)

How do you teach researching?
Do you have any suggestions for what should be in a researcher’s workshop?

 Edited image by mrsdkrebs; original CC image by @sandymillin and #eltpics.

Agents of Change vs. Status Quo

Here’s my report back after a few days of history class where students OWNED this standard:

Understand the role of individuals and groups within a society as promoters of change or the status quo.

  • Understand that specific individuals and the values those individuals held had an impact on history.
  • Understand significant events and people, including women and minorities, in the major eras of history.

They came up with presentations, movies, and blog posts to show how they understood this Iowa Core standard. You can find links to their projects here.

However, when I read this quote from Becca’s blog post, it made me realize this unit was a success:

When we had to present, I saw all the other topics and I saw how hard the people [in history] tried to change the status quo. It makes me want to change things that are important. When you look at how hard they tried to make a change in history, and they didn’t do it just for them–it was for other people who wanted what they wanted.

Related posts:

First Post SBAR and Making the Perfect Cremé Brulee

Second Post Day 2 – Promoters of Change or the Status Quo

The Iowa Caucus in Our Classroom

I find it amazing that Iowa plays a role in nominating the president of the United States. Like it or not, it is part of our crazy political history here in the United States. (Winners in Iowa Caucuses often go on to become the nation’s nominee. In the last 20 years only Bill Clinton in ’92 and John McCain in ’08 did not win in their respective Iowa Caucuses.)

Today in history class we had our own Republican caucus. Just one person was excited about that. From others were heard things like:

“Why do I care about the nominees? I’m not old enough to vote.”
“I don’t want to vote for any of them because they have too many commercials on TV!”
“That’s right! I am ready to shoot my television!”
“I’ll vote for Perry because he’s a platypus.”

(If that last one is an inside joke, I missed it.)

Because some of them didn’t know much, the first thing they did was research.

They used two resources, each candidate’s home page and ABC’s Republican Presidential Candidates Guidebook.

Next, they gathered in each part of the room representing their top candidate.

Then, they gave eloquent speeches to try to convince others to join them in supporting their candidate.

“We need someone young.”
“Well, Ronald Reagan was older when he was elected.”
“He would pull our troops out of the wars and not be so quick to start wars with other countries.”
“He has a lot of campaign debt. Can’t he raise support?”
“I want to vote for her because I want a woman in the White House and she is against abortion.”
“Most candidates in the GOP are against abortion, but you also need to consider ____________.”
“What’s the GOP?”

(Nice debates, mostly coherent, happened around certain issues that will remain vague here.)

Just one was convinced to change loyalty for her candidate.

And the voting went for Rick Santorum.

All-in-all, I was very pleased with the depth of discussion by the end of the period. I assigned them homework — watch the news tonight and/or go to the Caucus — students and observers are welcome.

It’s hard to believe that this same group of eighth grade students will be invited to participate in the official 2016 Iowa Caucus, helping to choose the candidates who will run for the president of the United States. (Teachers, we have work to do!)

Interesting (and Perhaps Slightly Related) Resources

“Are the Republican Candidates all Crazy?”
“Observations From 20 Years of Iowa Life” by Stephen Bloom
“Stephen Bloom ‘Does Not Speak for the University'”
“Iowa Nice”

Ahh, Friday!! Anyone!

This week in science we are building beams. It’s a structural engineering competition we do at Technology Students Association. I asked the seventh graders to write three people in their class whom they would like to work with. One student wrote, “anyone.”

Guess who a majority of the students had on their shortlist? Yes, the same student who wrote anyone! What a gem!

Using iMovie as a Teleprompter

Krayton took the role of President of the United States for a history assignment recently. She typed her speech into a scrolling credits text box on iMovie. She played with it for a while to find the right speed.

After practicing, she opened Photo Booth and started it videotaping. Then she started the “movie”, which was only scrolling credits. When you do this, Photo Booth is actually in back of iMovie, so the distraction of having to look at yourself while it’s filming you is not there. Make multiple scrolling credit clips if you need more than a two-minute speech, as there seems to be a two-minute limit, at least on iMovie ’08. There will be a big gap, where you just take a break. Then continue to speak when the next one begins.

During breaks and when she messed up, Krayton just kept the camera rolling. After she gave the whole speech, she edited the movie on iMovie. Here is her final project.

Student Evaluations of #GeniusHour

#Geniushour was last week. Students products are posted here. The following post has their answers to evaluation questions about their work during #geniushour.

NOTE on 12/6/2011 – The last student finally completed the evaluation, so I am updating the stats below with all the student data. I’m also using a new feature I just learned today–“Show Summary of Responses,” a feature on Google forms. Easy!)

Like Tia’s class is doing this week, we actually ended up with about 100 minutes of genius. When asked to evaluate the time frame, more than half the students thought there was not enough time.




Suggestions for making genius hour better…

  • Have more time (echoed by 9 students)
  • More teachers to help with questions to improve our learning experience
  • More of a heads-up so that we can bring what we need
  • More classrooms so that it isn’t so loud and crowded
  • It might have been better if people knew what they were doing before they started and not have just thought of something last minute.
  • It would be better if people didn’t mess around and just got to work and knew what they were doing.
  • How I think that genius hour would be better is that you could bring in new games for us to play so we learn something new every time.
  • Genius hour would be better if it was on a Monday so we have something to look forward to because usually Mondays are long and boring. I think genius hour should be on Mondays, so Mondays aren’t so long for the class.
  • To be able to have groups of maybe 4 or 5 at the most.
  • It could have been more organized; it was sort of chaotic. (echoed by 2 others)
  • Refreshments
  • Drinks
  • Music

Something I learned or a mistake I learned from…

  • When we made the collage out of our pictures that we had edited, some of the collages would change the way our pictures looked. We worked through it helping each other. Plus when we needed a scanner because one person didn’t have any digital pictures, we used the computer camera to take pictures of her hardcopy pictures.
  • I learned how to film a video while we were acting. My group wanted to have someone else film for us, but we figured out how to do it without anyone filming.
  • I learned that being independent is good. Trying new things is awesome. And I think everything went pretty good.
  • Next time I will plan out what I would say in the video.
  • I would have used 3 desks instead of 2, so it would be more sturdy and my project wouldn’t fall off.
  • I would have used thinner wood for the birdhouse.
  • I learned a lot about how the plane did not fly.
  • Next time I would make something better.

What I enjoyed most…

  • That I was able to learn about what I am interested in, not what we have to know and teachers going cram cram cram. I learned some of my writing limits.
  • Not being told exactly what to do. (echoed in similar words by 6 others)
  • I liked that we were able to do whatever we wanted to try to contribute to the world.
  • Getting to work with your friends, trying new things on the computer, having our own independent time to work. Acting out and filming the video.
  • That we had plenty of time to get everything done.
  • It was fun; we created some really cool things. Thought of things that I might never have thought of writing about.
  • What I like most about genius hour is that you can do whatever you like from videotaping to coloring to learning about a new program. You can always learn something new in genius hour.
  • My favorite part was seeing what everyone did.
  • Being with my friend.
  • Making the bird house and filming it for others to see.
  • I enjoyed Genius Hour. I think it taught us that we as 7th and 8th graders can change the world with our genius.