Wow, how can it be April already?

We have been working on many things related to reading, writing, literary devices of metaphor, simile, alliteration, conflict-internal/external, pre/post quizzes and a deeper understanding of reading through these literary devices that authors use.
We have even done two connecting to text short focused art projects. One related to student novels they are reading in class. The other one related to an informational reading of Bees and Colony Collapse Disorder. This reading packet, that I crafted, used information relating to this huge issues of disappearing bees and the impact on all of us. The art projects, completed just before a vacation, helped to demonstrate a deeper understanding of this topic. Students were free to engage their MultipleIntelligences and create a visual display of their this topic.

We are also working on some writing and have been all throughout the year. We focus in on these informational topics under study, and write paragraphs which I post on my secured Google + Novels page. It's nice to see the student work displayed there.

The goal is always to spend a larger amount of time, than is spent in the mainstream, on these concepts and I also spend a great deal of time in daily mini lessons, recycling these concepts continually to reinforce and work towards mastery. Deep reading with deep understanding is not a clear path for all. Students will arrive at that destination when they are ready. The key is to constantly approach these deep reading skills, develop comprehension skills, and thinking skills in ways using many different resources and topics. 

As we are nearing another round of testing, I am also working to help students develop their test taking skills. Most recently this week, Rhyme Scheme has been the focus. Onwards and upwards......

Reflection-Week 7 Blog Post-Class Reflection

Application Assignment Blog Post- Week 7 Karabaic,Stephanie Three years ago I transformed my classroom into one that is highly technology based.I did this with ample support and guidance. I then flew with it and evolved in my understanding, knowledge and practice in using the varied and daily technology that seems to come flying at us with warp speed. Everyday there are new apps for the ipads, new programs, and new tools that we need to consider as to their application in our classrooms. We need to embrace that which can further advance our students’ understanding and engagement and reject those things that are merely just mimicking other more established tools. It’s easy to become overwhelmed by the pace at which these technologies are advancing and arriving. To just keep up with some of the digital trends can boggle ones mind. I follow a few outstanding technology blogs and find their delivery to my facebook page or to my email a gift. How wonderful that these blogs serve the singular purpose to digitally deliver the latest and greatest educational technology trends directly to me. For this purpose, I have always loved receiving blog feeds, but have not yet embraced them for use with my students. I am still unsure if I am going to use the blog feature of Haiku, my Learning Management System, rather than a site like Blogger. I do think blogs have some great educational applications and am moving in the direction of using them in my classroom. The teaching and learning process is distinctly different when using technology with students. As a teacher, you have to use technology not just for technology’s sake but with an end in mind. As an educator, I always try to accomplish the goals of deeping reading, while covering the Common Core standards by using technology whenever possible. In this way students are getting exposure and hands on experience with identified academic skills along with those identified essential digital skills. Sometimes,however some students may misuse technology and as educators we need to be sure that the safeguards are in place to prevent misuse as well as clearly communicating what is acceptable and what is not acceptable when it comes to technology use in the classroom. The ability for students to move to other websites, or instant message or email another student instead of working on the task at hand remains an issue for me at times, with certain students. It is those types of events which may turn some teachers off from using and integrating technology into their classroom instructional model. I still remain teacher centered but am conscious of moving in the direction always towards learner centered. I have a great deal of behaviorally challenged students this year and classroom combinations that are extremely difficult to manage. Many of those behavioral issues have balanced out to a tolerable level. However, two classes remain a challenge to complete academic work as a group. This is not due to technology but because of those behavioral issues, my ability to utilize digital tools effectively with these two groups remains frustrating and challenging. For most of my students, the kinds of work we do as a large group is a great experience, however 40% of my classes are so behaviorally disconnected that working as a large group may have to be something I alter for the instructional atmosphere to be effective. For some students the independent nature of many technology based assignments poses too many challenges for them. Consequently, we need to employ technology when technology achieves the goals we have for students. When students cannot manage technology successfully, then we need to modify its use and application. One of the NETs standards for students is as follows: “Exhibit a positive attitude toward using technology that supports collaboration, learning, and productivity”(ISTE.org/nets,2012) Perhaps my behaviorally challenged students are further challenged because they have not previously been exposed to much educational technology in the school setting. These 7th and 8th graders should be able to successfully navigate using technology without my fearing their misusing it. Then my focus shifts from the task to the implementation and tools being used. Students need to be taught how to behave when using technology and for some that means constant reminders. When a teacher has a group of behaviorally challenged students, perhaps it’s too much of a lofty goal to utilize technology on a daily basis. I am a realist, which does compete with my desire for all of my classes to utilize technology at the same level, perhaps I need to reassess some student groups’ ability to do work successfully using technology. In two years, I see myself not as a Reading and Writing Specialist who transformed her classroom into a 21st Century digital classroom, but instead as a technology integrator who assists other teachers in developing their own 21st Century skills in the classroom and enriching their students’ instruction with blogs, podcasts, ipads, digital storytelling,and digital video tools. Additionally, I see myself as continuing to develop my own technology rich skills. Another goal I’ve identified is my technology knowledge and expertise will be at a level, where I can maintain a professional blog that others will choose to follow to enrich their own 21st Century Skill Set. There I can post samples of what is possible, apps that are worth their notice and time and ways to teach specific academic skills enhanced and entrenched in technology. I can make screencasts and Youtube.com videos using Googleplus Hangouts. I can serve as a source and a place to go to for technology information. International Society For Technology in Education (2012). iste.nets.s Advancing Digital Age Learning. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.iste.org/. [Last Accessed December 14,2012]. http://www.iste.org/standards/nets-for-students

My Podcast Link-Interviewing Middle School Reading Students about Technology Use

Here is my  podcast for my interview of my students regarding their technology tools, use and preferences for using technology in school. I actually have data from last year at the close of my ipad grant which I included in this post. Additionally, I survey this year's students as I  start every year with student surveys.One survey relates to technology usage and technology tools. I did ask my students a few additional questions but having most of the data, I just had to organize it.  Due to this week's activities and my presentation at Christa McAuliffe Technology Conference, I was not able to get audio permissions completed and returned. Instead, I did a podcast of my voice with the information.

Here is the link to my podcast: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hb7oxt10gzdqi3v/2012-11-29%2011_05%20student%20technology%20survey.wav

I also had numerous problems uploading my podcast due to Vermont's deathly slow internet download/upload speeds, so I  wasn't able to accomplish the download to a podcast host site.

Busy Lives -No Time for Loss of Blog work...

I  am feeling a level of frustration that cannot be imagined.  After investing  many hours of my own time to create a group blog for my graduate class, manage it, make necessary corrections when participants posted their post on the wrong page, deleted gadgets, and lost the page setup and other participant work on the blog, I logged in today, and found that I am locked out.

I am too busy for game playing, intentional or unintentional editing, and mistakes that leave the blog inaccessible. If someone made an error, then they need to report that error to the group. I do not  have the luxury of setting up another one, and am very upset and concerned as this could also occur in a classroom situation with students. 

This happening speaks to the complexity of working in a group in a digital setting. Lessons will  be learned from this and will  help me to refine how, when and if I will ever use this tool with my students. Perhaps the  actual WIKI will not be the format I  will  choose. Blogger may function better.  All in all,  frustration and  anger will lead me to understanding a better way to do this in the future!

Evaluating 21st Century Skills

As I visited the site, Partnership for 2st Century Learning, http://www.p21.orghttp://www.p21.orgI knew I had been here before, as I am always reading watching the trends so I can stay up to date in my own teaching. I clicked on a few links and found myself looking at the Geography and 21st Century Skills page. Eighth grade objectives had students looking at web images of countries, and I immediately thought of using Google Earth. Students were to look at the different shapes of the countries and their specific geographic surroundings to evaluate how those countries’ shapes and exact location could affect the political nature of the country. This is clearly deeper thinking than most Social Studies classes require of their students at the 8th grade level.

As I contemplate some of these deep thinking activities, I realize that we have not prepared our students for this deep reflective questioning. Students come to my support periods to complete homework in Social Studies and to get the answers done. They rarely read, but instead scan the page to ‘find’ the answer, much like a mother who has left her older child in charge of her younger child and spins through the store to get exactly what she needs knowing she just has to get it done quickly. When we ‘give’ homework to students which does not really require thinking skills but rather search and find skills, they walk away empty handed and losing out on valuable learning potential. Most students think of the work they do in class and especially the homework, as busywork. Students have not been taught to read, and stop to think about the material. Then continue to read stopping to think, and finally respond. Perhaps that could be a good use of a Wiki or web page, requiring students to read and reflect, rather than rush to just answer the questions as posed at the end of the chapter. Instead for most students, it’s a hodgepodge of get it done. How sad that these same students are relatively successful, yielding good grades for accomplishing little in the way of analytical and reflective thinking.

Moving on to the English and Collaboration goal page, I liked the idea of researching a piece of historical fiction as a collaborative team and posting that research with web links, to a class or group Wiki. Here students have read a piece of historical fiction and worked in teams to delve deeper into the story behind the story. It’s through that deep exploration that these 8th graders will connect the realistic historical references from the book and more, to the story presented to them in historical documents. They also are defining and strengthening their collaboration skills doing these types of activities. Teachers could scaffold the project and have a student research housing and they could draw the types of houses from that period of time in history. Other students could research the clothes of the day, finding images or using ipad apps to make realistic recreations of a person dressed from that time period. This level of instruction, fact finding, collaboration, and authorship really will require a different classroom model. Long gone is the teacher as the leader and expert holder of information. Now, the teacher needs to teach information, skills, and then teach students how to search for information and build and develop their Wiki or their project based web page. In this new scenario, the teacher plays numerous more roles and will need to jockey between the roles to scaffold, as needed. Today’s teacher in this classroom will be: teacher, technology integrator, search guru, and a collaborative conductor.

I landed on a page,under Tools and Resources, that took me on a ride to “Route 21 Overview”. Once again, all the great things we can and should be doing, but there exists a major disconnect between what is possible and what is probable given our limited technology, digital tools and infrastructure in our individual buildings. It occurred to me as I was looking at this site, that perhaps we need to stop housing classrooms in separate and distinct school buildings and instead move into the very corporate buildings that will house these very students as workers in 8, 10, 15 years. If we pulled all of our teachers, principals and different levels of students and walked them down the street to the office buildings, setting up shop there, we would have the infrastructure and the digital tools, plus really nice corporate spaces to work in. The cafeteria would probably have better food than the school lunch program provides. It’s crazy to think that we might need to do just that to get the digital resources we need, so we can ‘actually’ do all the incredible ideas as espoused on the Partnership for 21st Century Learning site. Will it be almost the 22nd century when we finally are ‘tooled’ for the 21st Century, I wonder?

Under the Policy makers link, I traveled to ‘state initiatives’ and found my teaching state of NH isn’t even listed, hence part of the problem. Only 14 states out of 50 are listed. Should this be a concern to anyone who is screaming that American schools are not doing enough? Isn’t this a relevant piece of the puzzle? As stated on the About Us, area of the Partnership For 21st Century Skills, “21st Century Skills are no longer just for the top tier, or just for those students headed to college, but essential for all students.”(Partnership For 21st Century Skills, http://www.p21.org/about-us/our-history )

As discussed in the article, The New Literacies, the essential basic skill of reading has changed with these new digital technologies. As a reading teacher, I am not only teaching students decoding, breaking up of words, how to figure out unknown vocabulary in the content of sentences, but I am thankfully teaching students reading in my class using digital tools.

“Foundational or traditional literacy is about print on a page, or decoding and making sense of words, images and other content that a reader can string together and then begin to comprehend. They are the words and pictures students read and pore over that are contained in textbooks,in novels, on standardized tests, and even in comic books. The new literacies encompass much more. Their utility lies in online reading comprehension and learning skills, or 21st century skills, required by the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs), including content found on wikis, blogs, video sites, audio sites and in e-mail. They require the ability not just to “read” but also to navigate the World Wide Web, locate information, evaluate it critically, synthesize it and communicate it—all skills that are becoming vital to success in this century’s economy and workforce.”(Miners & Pascopella, 2007)

The implications are clear that if we are not using digital tools to teach today, we are shortchanging our student learners. We need to passionately demand these tools using resources like the Partnership for 21st Century Learning as a way to communicate to those school based policy makers, that spending money on digital resources is not shopping for a fine wine on a beer budget but rather, is as essential as clean drinking water for our student learners and for our society as a whole.

Works Cited:

Miners, Z., & Pascopella, A. (2007). The new literacies. District Administration, 43(10), 26–34. Used by permission.

Partnership for 21st Century Skills, retrieved November 21, 2012, from http://www.p21.org/

Six Scaffolding Strategies to Use with Your Students | Edutopia

Six Scaffolding Strategies to Use with Your Students | Edutopia

Board Member-Visits my classroom....

It was of course a Friday afternoon.That was when the board  member would arrive for period 6, right after lunch. I made the decision to tell my students the day before of our visitor. We talked about body language of laying your head on your arms on the table as we  work. We talked about how that physical stature is not  one that promotes engagement, aka-don't do it!

The board member is a very nice man and a realist.  He was supposed to come to my class  3 weeks ago, when quite suddenly we had a  power outage. Our power was out for an hour totally, and just before we sent the kids home the power came back on. Needless to say, they were annoyed! Now would be our new day for our visitor. This board member is assigned to our school. He will visit several times this year.  I found it interesting and still do that of all the classrooms and all the programs going on in the school that my class was spotlighted as one on his first visit list. Hmm, it does make me a little nervous. With Read 180 and System 44 down  in the 5/6th grade wings, my imagination wonders if they believe that Read 180 is also the answer for grades 7 and 8, my grades. This is just one reason why I am doing two things right now. Enrolling in the Technology Integrator program through Walden will demonstrate my newest passion of technology integration. Actually it's not a new passion, but for the first time last year, I am thinking of this as a new direction. Another way I am demonstrating my knowledge and growing expertise is through creating a spreadsheet and a google site showing examples of my technology knowledge,  integration,  and instruction to students and staff alike. This documentation is for an alternate route certificate as a New Hampshire Technology Integrator. The two paths cross to show that I am a serious contender when a position  opens up in my district. With my teaching background, my daily use of technology, my Walden program, and my Alternate Route process I think I will be a good candidate for any technology integration position.

Now, back to the board  member. He came during my lunch in my room. I  explained that the NIE periods, study hall type of 1/2 periods  that surround lunch periods, I was helping students, so this was my lunch. He said that is okay, and clearly didn't get the message I was trying to send him! It was fine. Soon  students  filtered in, and I asked them  to introduce themselves. They did a great job. We worked on a Google Document  using the projector and the Smart Board and Smart Pens. Students were doing all the work.  I wanted him to see the students in my smaller class actually use the technology. They love  using  the pen to highlight the key ideas from an article that I cut and paste into a Google Document to later practice  'putting it in their own  words' or paraphrase it!

I think he was impressed with the kids and what they were doing. I know that I was pretty proud of them....I think I owe them some chocolate on Tuesday!