Cell Phones in the Classroom

Eeek! What a subject! I am completely bamboozled while I try to read through the lab in our CEP812 class. Cell phones in 5th grade would be a distraction... Hands down (at least in my room). Our school has a strict policy for elementary students that cell phones stay in the locker (mostly this is prevent them from losing them....). the one time I have used cell phoens is as timers. I know that sounds odd but sometimes when we need to time something then I pull out my iPhone and the kids run and get their cells.

That said, I move onto other portable devices.

KINDLES! Yeah! Our school has a wonderful reading program called Golden Dragon, where they read a specific amount of books and get to go to a great party. All the books they pick are incredible, but the added twist was this year they could check out Kindles! With parent permission my 5th graders have excitedly received an email and been able to go pick up their Kindle from the library that is filled with all the Golden Dragon books! Amazing! What was even better was how many of them came back from Christmas break with their very own Kindle... From this teachers point of view, anything we can do to have them read more and feel excited about it, then let's do it!

We also have "Playaway's" in the library which are little mp3 players that contain one book for the kids to listen to. This is particularly popular with the ELL population at our school.
iPads are all around our school now. We just got a new iPad cart which is great, I have yet to check it out as the list to do so is incredibly long and my kids all have their own lap top, so I don't want to get overly greedy, but that guilt will pass soon!!
Flip cameras are great. My kids love to post movies they make and we have a great video project called "Day int he Life" where the kids make movies of one day int heir life and then edit them using Movie Maker. it is a beloved 5th grade project that may get thrown out as we are heading towards the Common Core and it is hard to battle to fit the project into our new standards... pity... Flip cameras are very easy to use, the one problem I tend to have with them is the sound can be not great. But we are getting quite adept at voice overs...
I am planning on trying to use Poll Everywhere with my kids next week. I was thinking of asking them which program they like the best of the ones we are trying for my Wicked Problem Project.

Part A- Brainstorm Session

Here are the meeting parts for our first group project. I am not, unfortunately, featured in the meeting as I am way love here in Poland, and the rest of my group is in the US. First impressions is that I am working with excellent people(Jen and Dilly)! Thanks to both of them for being so SUPER flexible!!!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Here are my thoughts after I listened to all three of the sessions (3 as they used Skype and Jing and Jing is limited to 30 minutes).

• I am so glad you picked ToonDoo!! What fun!!!
• Toondoo is totally free which is awesome! My kids have done a few projects which are fun (just Toons) and they have really liked it. I did want to check out the book part as the Toons seemed sort of short.... Which was a bit limited..
• I do have a pro-version of Camtasia so I think I could put together a bunch of Jings if we wanted to split up ToonDoo into chunks and each take a chunk. Then we Jing that part and I can stitch them together into one movie.....Just a thought...
• An intial "chunking" of ToonDoo (not necessarily in order)... Looks like this: 1). Toons (how to create cartoons-this is easy, my fifth graders showed me to day although there are lots of little pieces), 2). Books (a lot like Toons but I think you can have MORE, you do need to make Toons first then put them into the books), 3). The Basics of ToonDoo (how to sign up, the profile, Tools, the help Wiki) 4). Traitr a place to make characters 5). ImagineR- a place to edit and play with uploaded photos or images 6). doodleR- A place to draw.
• I am great at Prezi and I am getting really good at Camtasia, so assign me whatever you need :)
• I have been playing with ToonDoo, one downfall is the loading time...But making cartoons is EASY and fun! The tools are really good, once you are in it is EASY!
• We are meeting again on Wednesday for a follow up.
• Here is a link to one of my literature circles blogs where they used ToonDoo to describe scenes from their book. Feel free to comment on them as a friend of mine :) They would dig that!

Some tutorials I found:

A Teachers Guide to Toondoo- a WordPress blog that introduces the basics...

A good pdf for a reference on the basics

Under Ten Minutes-very cool! In a nice British Accent :) This is a great example of what our presentation could look like!

Surveys and survey results

For one of our assignments in CEP812 we were to use online survey tools to gather information about technology use. I chose to use Survey Monkey. I sent the survey to the 5th grade here at American School of Warsaw. Approximately 46 students took the survey (which can be seen here) and here are the results (I am not showing all the results, just the ones I found interesting AND I apologize for the size, because I am not a paying member of Survey Monkey I had to crunch the numbers using Excel, maybe they should think about giving teachers some sort of free services like a lot of the other great internet tools out there). I changed some of the questions on the survey as we have a one to one laptop program at this school.

In this questions you can see that mostly the kids learn new things at school (67%) or at home (27%). so perhaps the one to one program is working after all....

How often do you use a computer to....... In the everyday category the winners were 1). Sending and receiving emails (48.9&) and 2). finding information on the internet (60%). Was this surprising? Nope. In the 5th grade we are currently researching persuasive topics using our school databases, but we often "google" our questions, anything from converting km to mi to "Are crickets incomplete or complete metamorphosis?". And email is big here too. My students communicate with me via email if they are sick, if they have a question about the homework, I send them links, Google docs, surveys.... What was surprising was that 30% of my fifth graders never used Facebook, I assumed many more were on it.

I liked this question.How well are you able to: In the "Really Good" category there were a lot of winners: send and receive email (56.5%), finding information on the internet (34.8%)and ..... playing computer games (30.4%)! What was interesting however, was what they did not feel they could confidently do (marked with a "Not Very Good" or "OK"), perhaps we need to brush up on these items: creating videos, working with spreadsheets/databases, editing their papers and creating a Powerpoint. I know for a fact that I am guilty of shunning the Powerpoint, much preferring the newer methods of Prezi, Slideshare, or VoiceThread. We discussed this in our team meeting and found it funny that we had veered away from the standard forms of presentation and relied much more heavily upon internet resources or just plain pure speeches (we do a huge speech unit). Should we change? Up for debate.

When you are using a computer (instead of paper and pencil) to do your school work do you: the most interesting item from this was "Get more confused when using a computer to" a whopping 58.7% picked sometimes. I expected less from my students, but here is the proof in the pudding, these little netbooks still confuse the issue sometimes.....

Part B-Application of TPACK

What is the TP knowledge for the solution?

How does technology support the solution to my problem of differentiation in math teaching in my classroom? I think the question is, how doesn't it help? A typical math lesson in grade 5 here looks like this: 5-15 minute lesson (whole class, generally on the interactive white board), 1-2 pages of math problems (during this time the students work on their own with myself and my assistant rotating around the room looking for students who are not understanding), during this time I have three or four students who finish in about 3 minutes so they move on to a packet of work (at the present a pre-algebra packet), the rest of the students either take the whole time until the end of the period or they finish sporadically. So what do I do with the middle and high group? I let them loos onto interactive online activities that let them move at their own pace, and can be checked for progress... Insert:technology!

What is the TC knowledge for the solution?

How does the technology make the content more intellectually accessible? The content in these online math programs is presented in many ways. In general they start with a lesson, the lesson gives the students problems along the way that keep the students interested (novelty), if at any time the student feels confused or unsure the help is there in the form of tutorials, videos or simplified problems. Thus the presentation of the content is very user friendly for self-pacing.

What is the PC knowledge for the students?

How will my students experience the content given the instructional strategies? The problem that I run into with math is pacing. Just naturally some students are faster at math than others. It's not a problem, we usually move everyone through the standards and in general they receive what they need in order to move on to the next level. The higher level students need a boost up in order to keep them motivated, but I need this to happen while giving me the time to also get the students who are falling behind a helping hand. The content on the programs that I have been researching run at a self-pacing level allowing students to discover the content at a pace they can handle. For some that means flying, for others it may mean dabbling... The content is presented in a way that the students are allowed the freedom to interact with it and stay motivated because they pace themselves.

WWP Part C-Research 2- Khan's Academy

I started using this site a few years ago with all the incredible videos explaining math. Then I attended a math share alike conference a few months back and one of the teachers showed the "Coaching" part of Khan's Academy so it is time to give it a whirl... Here is an article from Wired Magazine about Salman Khan that explains all about how he got started and what the site is all about.

First impressions:

• The video tutoring is great, it is chunked into small enough pieces so the students will not get bored and not have too much to learn in one session.
• The log ins are connected with Facebook and Gmail (which works for us as we are a Google School!).
• The Knowledge Map is incredible (see picture below). Students can easily go through and follow a path or they can choose lessons as they want.
• The coaching is easy to use, students can signup for a coach using their email, with my 5th graders it took about 5 minutes to get everyone logged and signed up with me as their coach!
• We will be experimenting with the coaching this week

The Knowledge Map:

Implementation notes:

• All students with the exception of one (who has a hard time following directions, so she forgot to log into her Gmail before going onto Khan) were able to sign me up as their coach. I was easily able to check whether or not the students were there and what they had accomplished. It was very telling to see what the kids accomplished in 30 minutes, some watched videos, some did lessons, some even tried trigonometry (without success, but it is pretty cute).

WWP Part C-Wicked Problem-Research....

I have started digging around and have come up with three separate categories:

1. Teacher Resources- mostly teacher driven items, such as interactives, resources for the whiteboard, ect.

2. Student Resources- games

3. Student Resources- systems that allow students to learn and grow individually, exploration.

Here is one of the first ones I looked at (that's Melissa White for your incredible wiki!).

Gizmo's from Explore Learning.

First impressions-wow! Very cool interactive activities. I decide to jump right in and invite my kids to use one of the Science labs (I want to concentrate on math, but this was just too appropriate) so I assigned them the Germination Lab. This was an excellent example of a controlled experiment where the kids could choose factors affecting germination (light, water, heat and different types of seeds) and then experiment by themselves or with the pdf document.

The sign in for students was very easy, I sent them an email with the log in link and a code to get to the specific class, they created a log in using their school email and they arrive at the lesson. Here is where it got messy (which admittedly happens a lot with our little net-books which have what we call "problem magnets" on them), only a few of them had the upgrade needed so only a few of them could do the interactive by themselves. I quickly adjusted and we went through the interactive on the active board together, which turned out to be a lot of fun!

Immediate thoughts:

• It is not clearly posted how much this would cost, so asking for funding would prove difficult. If you want to find out you contact them, someone contacts you, they give you prices and blah blah blah... A lot of work..... (Update on pricing 2/3- This was the quote we received, it is WAY too expensive for us to get this... bummer, because it is GREAT, the price fits something we would use on a daily or weekly basis but after experimenting with these lessons this would probably be used two or three times monthly... ) The quote: Definitely. The site license covers all teachers and students at the school for a full year for $7 per student, with a minimum total of $2,995 (all prices are US dollars). A department license would cover all teachers in either math or science and their students for $4.25 per student, with a $1,995 minimum total. Our Teacher Plus Students licenses cover one teacher and all of their students for $799 per teacher, but the rate drops to $599 per teacher if you have at least three teacher subscriptions.
  
  Our online training is $75 per teacher and is mostly self paced. We do include a weekly web conference with our trainer to ask specific questions and provide feedback, but the bulk of that is done in the US, so the times aren't what I would call "Warsaw friendly" (nor would the phone bill!). But what we would do is make sure that one of our trainers is available to you to answer any questions that you have.
• The tech issues will have to be dealt with, so I will try and have my students do another one...My computer was able to play the interactive day 1, but day 2 I needed another update... This can cause confusion with students, especially elementary students.
• It would be worth it for the school to have access, especially with the Activeboards. I will send an email with a link to the librarian who is in charge of databases, it could be a possible addition.....

Implementation thoughts (Feb 8,2012):

• This week I assigned the students a fractions lab. It consisted of 4 pages that they completed along with the interactive. The interactive was really interesting looking. I reviewed the Gizmo and the sheets with the students on Monday. We logged in and made sure that they could access the Gizmo. All this went exceedingly well. However that night I received a few emails from my kids. All of them were asking "Do I have to use the Gizmo if I can just do the math on paper?". Perhaps this is too easy? Looking for a harder one for next week....

Next... Khan's Academy...

Part A-Description of a Need-Wicked Problem Project

The problem:
At my current school we use a very experiential mathematics curriculum (Investigations by TERC) which is perfect for the younger grades, but not as comprehensive for the upper elementary grades. The curriculum is based on a lot of games, group activities and not a lot of actual pencil and paper. It is a great program, however, the transfer from elementary to Middle School, especially in math, can be traumatic for some students as they use a more conventional curriculum. It is not only the transition between schools, it also the fact that the curriculum comes with no resources for implementing any sort of differentiation within the math class for either high or low students. It also does not provide any sort of extra work in case students are struggling with a certain process. While I am at it, I certainly would not mind making math fun by adding some gaming into the equation (see the Ted videos embedded at the end of this post.)
How will technology help?
In general right now we differentiate using the copy machine. We make copies, and then more copies, we assign extra work, give homework, and gather small groups. However I believe with technology it would make a big difference to my different levels of student. I believe especially it would be great to come up with some self study programs for the higher level students who are motivated to continue their mathematics on their own. If I can find some internet based games, programs and/or downloadable programs that can be individualized and teach higher level skills to allow the students to take their futures into their own hands.
What is the scope?

I am hoping to find, review and test at least four different programs for the students. The time the students spend on each program will depend on the scope of the program (Does it focus on one mathematical principle or many?) I will have my students who finish their math early use it, and I will assign as homework for a few students instead of the regular math homework.
Relevant research and resources

I will be using several resources. Aside from general internet searches I will use our Professional Development Library (Mathematics Teacher Magazine), Cool Tools for Schools and our school belongs to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) where I can research their databases.
I plan on adding a web page to my current classroom website that will contain the listing of the resources for the students. I also plan to poll my students when they are using a specific program to see what they like about it and what they do not so I can compare the different tools that I find.

Indicators of a successful project

A recommendation for my fifth grade team and a list of resources that can aid us with implementing a better program for differentiation in math. What will it look like? At first just a website, hopefully ranked by my students, that lists resources as they are found and contains a precise descritption for the user before they choose which resource they will use (if they have not been assigned).