A Thanksgiving Project - StoryCorps: The Great Thanksgiving Listen

Ever hear of StoryCorps? It's a fantastic repository of recordings of ordinary people interviewing each other about ordinary to extraordinary events in their lives. Via the Story Corps website you can search by topic, then link to or embed them. There's even a StoryCorps podcast!

In addition to providing great supplementary content to your lesson planning, you can even have your students participate in this project. They have a StoryCorp app that can be used to record interviews and upload them directly to the StoryCorps repository. 

How is this related to Thanksgiving? StoryCorps has an initiative named The Great Thanksgiving Listen, encouraging teachers across the nation to assign their students to interview a relative over the holiday to capture an entire generation's worth of stories (free Teacher Toolkit available!).  Is this a FACS project or what?? (Or history, English, speech, math, science... You could work it in for any subject!)

Here's a short intro to the initiative, followed by a couple of examples from the last year's Great Thanksgiving Listen. I think you'll immediately be hooked, just like I was!

Drive-In Proposal

Bucky the Mailman

Governor Clark & Mother

Cell Phone Polling

There are oodles of web-based Audience Response apps available that students can use their mobile devices to respond to ("oodles" is in fact a scientific quantity). In this post we'll take a look at Poll Everywhere (yes, it's free!).

Poll Everywhere allows you to create polls or surveys, then provide your students with an access link. The polls can also be embedded within Powerpoint or Google Slides, a nice touch to any presentation. Here's a short survey example so you can get an idea of the different types of questions available:



Trouble accessing this poll? Try accessing it at pollev.com/denisec573, then think of the possibilities!

Another Cell Phone Idea

Continuing with the idea of using cell phones in class for good and not evil, how about a backchannel? Today's Meet is an easy to use (and free!) service that allows users to post to a feed remotely, using desktop or mobile devices. You create a free account, set up a "room," provide the link to your students, and they can add their thoughts, questions, or responses to the feed. There's a nice projector view you can use if you'd like that option, and you again have moderator control (you can even mute specific students without them knowing they're being muted).

You can give it a try right here! Just enter a name (or alias) where it says Nickname, click Join, then type in your thoughts. How about something you're reading this summer?

Using Cell Phones for Good Instead of Evil - Padlet

Cell phones. They are permanently attached to our high school students' hands (although a lot of adults aren't much better!). Dealing with mobile distractions during class is now a routine part of the job, so how about some routine ways of using them for learning?

Over the next couple of posts I'll share a few fun ways to incorporate cell phones into lessons. The first is Padlet - think of it as an electronic Post-It note board. After signing up for a free account, you can create customized boards then share the link with your students. When students pull up the board, they double click and a "sticky note" appears. They can enter text, images, hyperlinks... all sorts of fun stuff!

As the owner of the board you have the option to moderate the posts, so that something doesn't appear to everyone that shouldn't. You know what I'm talking about.

You can use this for all sorts of activities: brainstorming, asking questions, sharing resources, adding feedback. You could revamp activities you did using physical Post-Its like this one.

Give it a try here! You can visit the full-screen board to participate, or double-click on the smaller embedded one below. How about sharing something fun you're doing for yourself this summer? And yep, I'll have to approve your post before it's visible to others - gotta look out for the spammers!

Created with Padlet

A List: Ways in Which I Can Love Others

And this week's list...

• listen
• remember their stories
• send a note - snail mail!
• share pictures
• accept them as they are
• start each day fresh

Student connection tip: have you tried Remind? This is a double-blind texting service tailored for education. You set up a class, provide your students with a link, and they sign in to your class with their phone numbers. You can then send them reminders and other messages, without you seeing their number or them seeing your number, and you have a record of all exchanges in one place. It's a great service!

How is this relevant to this week's list? Occasionally I send out a "Throwback Thursday" message to my former students, to connect with them and show them I still think about them and care about them. Often it's just a photo to remind them of fun times past!

First World Problems: Reading Log Edition

NOOOOO! I have been a loyal Shelfari-an for years, faithfully recording my books read as well as back-tracking through my bookshelves all that time. I should have known; I had noticed over the past few months some of the features had begun to degrade and no one seemed interested in fixing it.

About a year and a half ago I looked at transitioning to Goodreads, as so many people seem to use it. I was even delighted to find that Shelfari had an easy export-to-Goodreads feature since they're both hosted by Amazon (should have known then!). However, upon exporting I discovered that all of the dates read were stripped out - kind of a super important detail! A huge part of the reason for keeping a log is to track when you read certain books, how many books you read in a given time period, etc.

And I had much better things to do with my time than to go through and add dates to hundreds of books.

Yet now I'm being forced to move. My fingers are crossed that the date issue has been corrected. I'm currently in the process of exporting, looks like it may take a while:


Anyone else out there devastated by the loss of Shelfari?

A List: My Current Podcasts

Inspired by another blogger (Little Mrs. Married) who is regularly posting lists to write more consistently, I'll share the podcasts I subscribe to:

• Freakonomics Radio
• Radiolab
• StoryCorps
• This I Believe: Podcast
• Happier with Gretchen Rubin
• TED Radio Hour
• PostBourgie
• Grammar Girl Quick and Dirty Tips for Better Writing

And a new favorite reserved for the gym: 

• Serial, Season 1

The ones at the top are what I listen to in the car, and sometimes while cleaning or cooking as well. Though I heard a lot of buzz about Serial last year I never picked it up until a couple weeks ago, and was immediately hooked. I like having something specific to look forward to during my treadmill sessions, as they are sooo booooring otherwise. I'm only halfway through the first season, so no spoilers please!

What do you listen to? Any suggestions I should add to my list?

Tech is Not the Enemy - Lack of Common Sense is

Hardly a day goes by when an education-related news article doesn't get me steamed, but this one I couldn't pass up:

In a nut shell, there was a freshman assembly, and during the assembly students were asked to use their cell phones to post anonymous questions that were immediately projected on the big screen for all to see.

And guess what happened?

My boss has often said that he wishes we could carry penalty flags like football referees, and throw them out when someone says or does something that is so alarming and revealing of their ignorance it's just simply unacceptable. There absolutely should have been a flag on this play as soon as someone suggested it. How could you not see this coming?

The three possible explanations I have come up with:

1. The people who planned this activity have never, ever been around high schoolers. Ever.
2. The people who planned this activity were high.
3. The people who planned this activity were suffering from traumatic brain injury.

The idea itself was a GREAT one - a fantastic way to keep students engaged in the seminar and to take away the fear of asking a question out loud in front of a crowd. Brilliant really.

BUT... no safeguards? Come on, it would have been ridiculously easy to set this up so that someone had to approve the questions before they were displayed. Appropriate question? Click, displayed. Inappropriate question or statement? Click, rejected. The end.

Tech is not the enemy, people. Lack of common sense is. If you don't have a firm grasp on the latter, don't use the former.

Google My Maps/Google Maps Gallery

A few people emailed me about the map I put up on yesterday's post, so I thought I'd share a little bit about it. Google My Maps allows you to create your own maps, then either share the link or embed the map within your website. Any time you make a change, it will automatically update wherever it is embedded/linked. For example, I will continue to add the cities of the teachers who donate to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society through my fundraiser, and it will update the map on yesterday's post every time. You can even access and edit your maps right through your Google Drive! This is a great tool to use to create resources for your classes, or for your students to create maps, too!

Another great related resource is Google Maps Gallery, which is a huge repository of maps created by others, individuals and institutions alike. There are maps related to pretty much any topic you can think of and find a related map, which you can then link to or embed. A few samples (click on the icon next to the map title for a description and to navigate the maps):

So yes, really, just about any topic you could think of!

Using Social Media for Good!

Social media is definitely like The Force - it contains enormous potential for good, but also has the Dark Side. As teachers we all know how everything from Facebook to Snapchat can used for evil  (oh, sophomore girls... sigh...), which makes us wary of its power.

But then, something good happens! This weekend I started a fundraiser offering a huge bundle of FACS resources in exchange for a $25 donation to the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, and just look at all of the cities FACS teachers have donated from so far! Thank you so much to all of you!!!

The fundraiser is of course still open, and I will continue to update this map - check back here to see the new locations added. Better yet, consider taking advantage of the special deal and have your own town added to the map! Not only will you gain an oodle of new classroom resources (there is an itemized list included with the details you can view before committing), but you will also be joining the cause of fighting blood cancers!

Docs Teach - a Great (Free!) Resource

Have you heard of Docs Teach? It's an online tool hosted by the National Archives that holds thousands of primary documents (and pictures, audio, video, maps, etc) along with a myriad of interactive lesson plans and activities based on those documents. You can even design your own activities based on documents of your choosing.

Think this could only work for history and government classes? Well, of course you don't, you know how interdisciplinary FACS is, but here's a random sample of items you could find:

• An activity about the School Lunch Program and the Federal Government, including photos from the Great Depression, original advertisements for the school lunch program, school lunch recipes from 1946, letters from PTA presidents
• Documents from an interview with a Montgomery Ward's executive as part of a Federal Trade Commission Home Furnishing Investigation on sewing machines
• A letter to FDR from a recently unemployed woman arguing that married women with employed husbands are stealing jobs from desperate single women
• Weekly family food supply plans published by the USDA in 1921
• Resources on Civil Rights, child labor, drunk driving, food labels, unions, taxes, interior design, architecture, social security, environmentalism... and so on

There's even an app, for you 1:1/BYOD/Cart people! My brief blurb doesn't do it justice - take a few minutes to browse around Docs Teach, I'm sure you'll not only be impressed but will immediately be able to think of all sorts of ways to use it in your classroom. Below is a short video to give you an overview. Enjoy!

PARCC, Social Media, AFT, and "Privacy"

So I'm taking a break from this (rather slow) description of my transition from teaching to the "other side" to ask this question: Why do people still believe that they have an expectation of privacy on social media???!!!! Perhaps like me you recently received this email from the AFT:

Warning: Rant headed right for you.

Now let me say straight up I am no big fan of Pearson or the PARCC, defending them is not my objective here. However, it makes complete sense to me that they would contract employees specifically to monitor social media for public posts regarding the test. This email (which conveniently provides no link to the original article by the way, including that hyperlink you see in the reference - it just leads to AFT's petition) defends the student by saying it "was nothing more than a tweet." It was upon reading that phrase that my brain began to bleed - TWITTER IS PUBLIC! 

Why do we keep waffling back and forth between telling students they need to careful about what they post on social media yet constantly defend their "right" to privacy? If you put something out there for everyone to read, then you have no control over who reads it. Period. You're "worried about a generation of kids growing up without a moment of privacy"? Teach them that social media is NOT PRIVATE! 

Really, how hard is this to understand, people? So no, AFT, I will not be signing this petition. Doing so would be agreeing that students don't need to think before they post, that they have a right to privacy in a completely public environment, that they need not be at all concerned about potential consequences of their actions. It would contradict everything I have tried to teach them about their online safety, which will just make them more vulnerable in the future.

And I realize that people will disagree with me on this, perhaps vehemently. I realize I may even get some angry responses. Why do I realize this? Because I understand that posting this in a public forum means that it is not private.

Uncle Ben's Responds

Hey, Uncle Ben's actually responded to my objection from Friday!

The Things I Steal From Social Media

Stole this idea from someone on Facebook/Pinterest/Twitter/somewhere. It was hanging the last four weeks of school. It once got up to three days.

That was the Tuesday after Memorial Day. Back to zero by second hour.

Do you want to build a snowman?....

Bloom's Taxonomy of Apps!

Today's entry is just sharing an incredible resource.

This is amazing - Bloom's Taxonomy of apps!

If you check out this link, you'll get this image in an interactive PDF, with links to all of these apps!

And this link will tell you all about this awesome resource. Enjoy!

Traveling to the Computer Lab

Here's an incredibly obvious idea that took me nearly eight years to come up with:

Whenever I want my classes to meet me in the computer lab, I've always scrawled a note and taped it to the door. This is inconvenient and takes 2-3 minutes every time, which is incredibly wasteful. It finally dawned on me to create a permanent solution.

We have two labs in our school: the "Main Lab" and the "Keyboarding Lab." I made double-sided signs for each class (one side for each lab), and printed them on paper in the color I have assigned to that particular class. Then I slid them into sheet protectors, and attached them with a book ring:

I placed a command hook behind my door to hold them when not in use, so that they are always exactly where I need them:

I hung two more command hooks (I LOVE command hooks, by the way - they rock!) on the outside* of the door itself, so I never again have to bother with tape.

Again, kind of a "duh" idea, but one worth sharing - I can't be the only one tired of slapping handwritten notes on the door.

Anyone else have something obvious yet helpful to share?

*If you happen to work in a building where there's a healthy chance anything you attach to the outside of your door will disappear, you'll want to hang your hooks on the inside so that the sign shows through the window. Just saying.

Job Wheel the Sequel

A year and a half ago or so I posted about a job wheel I created to assign miscellaneous tasks that need to be completed after each cooking lab. This year I've switched to displaying it on the projector during labs; it's easy to rotate the wheel in PowerPoint, and the different images accommodate classes with different numbers of cooking groups.

 

The morning Foods class only has four groups, so they are responsible for:

TABLE - clean off the ingredient table (close lids/boxes/containers, wipe off table)
FLOORS - sweep ALL of the kitchens and common area in between
TOWELS - make sure all towels are in the washing machine
POWER - check all kitchens to make sure all appliances are turned off

The afternoon Foods class has five groups, so one kitchen from that class is responsible for washing the ingredient containers. Meaning, if there was an ingredient I had poured out into a bowl or set out on a plate, I would take that item from the assigned kitchen and they would be in charge of washing and putting it away.

Below you can see a green bowl set out under the salt (the idea being that they lean over that bowl when measuring, rather than their mixing bowls or the table); on this day the "green" kitchen was assigned to Ingredient Containers, so it was their extra job to wash and put that bowl away.

I have to say, I'm impressed with how well this works. They always remember to check the board for their "extra" job, and I don't have to nag them to sweep or whatever. I'll also add that they're much more careful about brushing stuff onto the floor, knowing that someone else will have to sweep it - or that the other group may get revenge on them later on when it's their turn to do the sweeping :).

ifaketext

Can't remember if I've mentioned this before, too lazy to search.

I. Love. ifaketext.com

The possibilities are endless! 

Here is a video demonstration of how to use this service!

Quizzes and "I'm Done!"

Kids are usually good about staying quiet they are finished with a quiz/test until the rest of the students finish as well... actually, until the last two or three are finished. Then they start to get squirmy, then someone whispers, then... well, you know. So over the years I've tried a few different techniques:

-Being very specific about my expectations of their behavior .

-Having a short assignment for them to work on after. Usually this assignment would either be related to what we would learn next or a current news article about what we had just learned. 

-Allowing them to read or work on other classwork. 

These all worked fairly well, but there were some kinks. The slower test takers would become anxious about not having time to work on the assignment if one was given. Not everyone brought reading material. Allowing them to work on items from other classes inevitably led them to ask each other questions about the assignment. And so on.

A few years ago a guidance counselor mentioned that she knew of a teacher who always ran all of her tests/quizzes like a standardized test: when students were finished, they simply turned their quizzes over, kept them at their desks, and had to wait quietly until time was up. Just for the heck of it I gave it a try one day with a particularly short quiz. It worked like a charm. Apparently still having their quiz right in front of them made them more mindful of not talking or even whispering, because they didn't want to look like they were cheating. There was no shuffle of books or papers as they got out something else to work on, no questions or requests for help... just respectful silence. And a few nappers. I began trying it with longer quizzes and tests, and still consistently received good results. An unexpected result was that they spent more time double-checking their answers, as there was no benefit to rushing and finishing early. Also, as they were sitting there waiting for others to finish, a few students would suddenly think of an answer they were stumped on, and since they hadn't handed their test in yet they could go back and fix it.

The con for me was that since I didn't collect their work as soon as it was completed, I had less in-class grading time (always trying to reduce that take-home load!), but the benefits to the kids obviously outweighed my inconvenience.

The con for the kids was that some of the early finishers had quite a bit of time to stare into space. Although, since I always require some kind of drawing of a dinosaur on my quizzes/tests, I started getting some pretty darn elaborate sketches.

As I was writing my first quiz of this school year, I had a brilliant-why-didn't-I-think-of-that-years-ago moment, and I put a puzzle on the back. I made sure the kids knew that it wasn't part of the quiz and that it was optional, and the results were amazing! After finishing almost everyone worked on the puzzle intently, keeping them occupied past the time when the last student finished. Success! So I will definitely be doing this with all future items.

The puzzles I've included so far have had a wide-range of purposes.

One included vocab words that had been introduced but we were still learning:

One was simply a word challenge:

One was a review of past information we've covered:

All of these were created either in MS Word or by using a free online puzzle generator - there are dozens of good ones to choose from.

This may be my favorite "new thing I've thought of" for this year so far. If you think this would work for your kids, give it a try and let me know how it turns out!

Google Fail & Vitamin Poem

So we're all familiar with this internal dialogue/scenario:

"Hmmm, you know what would be great in this lesson? ____________! Let's Google that..."
6 seconds pass...
"There we go! Modify this a wee bit, combine with that... boom! I'm done! Now for Boardwalk Empire!"

And we're also familiar with this one:

"Hmmm, you know what would be great in this lesson? ____________! Let's Google that..."
16 minutes pass...
"What the heck??!! I CANNOT be the first person who has thought of this! What is the deal with these scurvy pirate teacher hoarders??!! Don't people know how to share??!! Dagnabbit!"

************************************************

Yeah, so I fell prey to Scenario #2 tonight, and I had to {gasp!} create my own wheel.

All non-teachers are now completely lost. Too bad.

In Foods 1 I'm working my way through a very basic introduction to the major nutrients. First, I will digress and discuss my Foods curriculum philosophy. I do not cook first quarter. For one, IT'S TOO DARN HOT! No air conditioning does not lend itself to a pleasant lab experience. Two, I find that it's absolutely crucial to spend a substantial chunk of time right out of the gate on nutrition; once we start in the kitchens the only thing the kids care about is "When're we gonna cook again? What're we gonna cook? Why do we have to learn this? This is stupid, why aren't we cooking?" and so on and so forth. So I start out with a big nutrition push, then go deeper as we cook our way through the different units.

And I begin with a basic overview of the six major nutrients, and drill them until they've got the real basic info and then we can begin to have intelligent discussions and really dig into the issues.

All this to say that this afternoon I was revamping the notes we take on vitamins, and I thought I'd really like them to be able to recall what each vitamin does, which is actually quite a bit of information and I don't want to spend days upon days just on vitamins. So, I'd need to boil it down to just the key information and give them some tricks to help them memorize them. At which point I thought, "There must be some kind of little poem or song out there about the vitamins!" Wrong. Could not find anything. Well, anything at all useful. Some weird stuff and some incomplete stuff, nothing helpful.

So I wrote my own. And since I am not a scurvy pirate teacher hoarder, I am going to share. Let me forewarn you that this is no work of genius; also, you really have to want it to make some of the syncopation work. Here it is:

And as I am big on both skeleton notes and graphic organizers, here is the form of the poem that my students will actually receive:

 And here's the filled in version:

We'll see how it works out!

And in case you're wondering, once we get into the more complicated stuff, I make them come up with their own stupid poems and memory devices, but first you gotta model, model, model.

Happy Sunday night!