Here is the 2 week IDP for Reece:
This is our current assessment. We need this in order to move on to both 2 and year goals
What are your strengths thus far?
--multimedia
--online publishing
--Web 2.0
What are some areas you are looking to improve
--presentation skills
--video editing
--networking
Attitude towards technology: open, positive, engaging, willing to embrace
Pedagogy/matters of curriculum instruction: use it to enrich curriculum and instruction. Never use technology just because it's there.
Practice: definitely use it to differentiate. Goal is to enrich experience. In other words, new ways of doing old things. Old things done old ways, old things done new ways. New things done old ways, new things done new ways. He prescribes to "old things done new ways, and new things done new ways."
The aforementioned is a summary of where we are at right now, 7.2.08.
Go-to person for Reece: network technician. He is Reece's team teacher, that if Reece has anything that stumps him, he can rely on him for help.
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2 Week Goals:
In the next 2 weeks, Reece wants to
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
How we're gonna shoot!
Here's the schedule for our group (me, David L, Sahngyoon): film everything Tuesday. Edit Tuesday and Wednesday. Be in Leigh's good graces and turn in on Thursday.
That's our plan. We're going to do 10 Things you didn't know about Blogs and Wikis. We still have to hammer out that part. That's my choice. They wanna go with 10 Things You Didn't Know About Blogs and Wikis in Asia. That could also work except that my three points/parts don't really have to deal with Asia. I just teach there. I'm easy like Sunday morning here, folks, so I'll do whatever they like.
David L is going to come up with 3 things tonight. Sahngyoon is going to come up with 3, and I have my 3.
They are:
1) Wikis are great for getting the quiet, shy wallflower students active and engaged in topics and projects. Tuesday after school I'll film me in our classroom quiet and meek and not saying anything. Then I'll film me at my dorm hooting and hollerin' as I pound away at my keyboard. It's simple, it gets the message across. I will also Camtasia screenshot a bit of my kids' wikis (WITH NAMES LEFT OFF THIS TIME SINCE THIS MAY BE SENT TO PUBLIC PLACES) and we'll edit that in the end of this one. Total time for this one should be about 20 seconds.
2) Wikis help students improve upon their voice and organization skills. Closeup shot of me with my fountain pen scribbling as I say the voiceover. Then I'll say "in a carefully conducted Teacher Inquiry Project this past year, I measured my 74 students' Voice and Organization scores as a part of the 6+1 writing traits. Their scores went up an average of .67 in Voice and .39 in Organization. Wikis work well to improve writing!" as I say all of this, I'll throw up a couple screenshots from my TIP
3) Technology knows no borders. I teach at a Dept. of Defense School in Japan. We have students from China, Korea, Philippeans, Guam, Japan, all 50 states, Canada and Mexico. They are very adept at using technology!" We began using wikis on January 30th, 2008. By Feb. 1st, almost every group had their wikis up and running! Don't know what video/graphics I'll have here.
That's my part. That leaves us with 9 things. We'll have to figure out the 10th one tomorrow (Tuesday).
That's our plan. We're going to do 10 Things you didn't know about Blogs and Wikis. We still have to hammer out that part. That's my choice. They wanna go with 10 Things You Didn't Know About Blogs and Wikis in Asia. That could also work except that my three points/parts don't really have to deal with Asia. I just teach there. I'm easy like Sunday morning here, folks, so I'll do whatever they like.
David L is going to come up with 3 things tonight. Sahngyoon is going to come up with 3, and I have my 3.
They are:
1) Wikis are great for getting the quiet, shy wallflower students active and engaged in topics and projects. Tuesday after school I'll film me in our classroom quiet and meek and not saying anything. Then I'll film me at my dorm hooting and hollerin' as I pound away at my keyboard. It's simple, it gets the message across. I will also Camtasia screenshot a bit of my kids' wikis (WITH NAMES LEFT OFF THIS TIME SINCE THIS MAY BE SENT TO PUBLIC PLACES) and we'll edit that in the end of this one. Total time for this one should be about 20 seconds.
2) Wikis help students improve upon their voice and organization skills. Closeup shot of me with my fountain pen scribbling as I say the voiceover. Then I'll say "in a carefully conducted Teacher Inquiry Project this past year, I measured my 74 students' Voice and Organization scores as a part of the 6+1 writing traits. Their scores went up an average of .67 in Voice and .39 in Organization. Wikis work well to improve writing!" as I say all of this, I'll throw up a couple screenshots from my TIP
3) Technology knows no borders. I teach at a Dept. of Defense School in Japan. We have students from China, Korea, Philippeans, Guam, Japan, all 50 states, Canada and Mexico. They are very adept at using technology!" We began using wikis on January 30th, 2008. By Feb. 1st, almost every group had their wikis up and running! Don't know what video/graphics I'll have here.
That's my part. That leaves us with 9 things. We'll have to figure out the 10th one tomorrow (Tuesday).
Sunday, June 29, 2008
Corporations trying to catch up
So this isn't about my iVideo or my iImage, but I wanted to document this because it reminded me of what that Jochaim dude said on TED the other day...open source, how content is being decided by the PEOPLE and the megalomaniacal corporations are now either playing catchup or taking cues from the little people. I thought this was a sad but kinda fun and tiny example.
Two years ago I remember watching this fun website where folks got together to FREEZE. Im sure you've seen it too. They meet in a park and a guy comes on with a bullhorn and tells everyone to set watches together. Then at 11:05 you freeze. Then at 11:10 unfreeze, then at 11:15 you slow walk. Link is here:
It was funny, they've done a bunch more, more non-ImproveEverywhere people joined in. But it was still at the local level. Then just this morning I see this one. Watching it I got a little suspect because the camera angles were too good. Then at the end I realized it was a marketing campaign. So now corporations are trying to tap into this niche to make a viral campaign. Oh well. Like this COOL video done by PBS in 02, Merchants of Cool, freeze motion has now been adopted by The Man, so it's now no longer going to be cool. Shame. I really like the idea behind it!
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Winding up!
Ja I'm here in Plymouth. MAET stuff! I just realized I'm supposed to do a couple things on this here blog. So let's get to it, hopalong!
1. We are living in an increasingly small world thanks to the wonders of technology--specifically the CCTV.
2. I want to show motion of some kind. Some kinetic thing but one person is singled out. I want the reader/viewer/watcher to feel almost like a voyeur. The other folks are blurred out, but one guy is sharp and focused. I want the viewer to glance around when they're done on Friday. On their way back to dorms/cars/whatever, I'd like for people to glance up and around in a sick kind of homage to Alan Funt. Are we on camera?
I guess I'd like to elicit some creepiness. Not a vomitous creepiness, but an unsettling creepiness. It's a fun thing to be safe. We should all be safe. But exactly where that lies is up to the viewer.
3. Using that one dude's ideas of flow and lines, I thought it would be best to border three sides with cameras. Each one forces your eyes into the middle. I WAS going to take pictures of 30 or 50 cameras out here in Plymouth but I decided against that. I only have a 50mm non zoom lense and some pictures would simply not work due to distance. Instead the flipping of images works just as well, I think.
No accident that I used google images for the tippy top two. I was trying to make you think of some kinda of eyeballs.
Let's get back to the first .8 seconds of viewing this. Your eyes are physically forced to the middle of the picture. But wait a tic, it's like an eye exam. Everything is blurry! The one person who isn't stands out. Looks almost cartoony (I didn't do anything special to Larson). So now the reader is asking why just one person is blurry. Don't CCTV cameras capture everyone? That's my point. It DOES capture everyone, but I want this to be individual. Guess what? YOU, YOU are one of the herd, one of the people being interviewed, dissected, and videotaped.
I'm gonna stop typing because I don't want to ruin my Monday reflection thing. Bye bye.
Monday, March 31, 2008
Winding Down
So I'm going to leave the wiki ON over spring break, and I'll do the final eval/questionairre the week after (two weeks from today). I want to see if the kids spend any time working on it over the break.
The wiki will continue until school ends, but for my purposes here in the MAET course, I'm done the 15th of April.
It has been everything I'd hoped and so much more. At a glance I'd reckon that at least half of the students check their wikis DAILY and about 85 percent of them have done some remarkable things with them.
I hope y'all have gone on and checked 'em out!
The wiki will continue until school ends, but for my purposes here in the MAET course, I'm done the 15th of April.
It has been everything I'd hoped and so much more. At a glance I'd reckon that at least half of the students check their wikis DAILY and about 85 percent of them have done some remarkable things with them.
I hope y'all have gone on and checked 'em out!
Saturday, March 1, 2008
So this was bound to happen
Almost every wiki has a chatbox on their main page. I actually encourage students to create one because it's so immediate and it's there on the page. I just checked on the wikis tonight and I saw one student who was upset because someone left a mean message on their wikiciv. I saw the message and I posted a general notice to everyone to be respectful and helpful to everyone else. It took me a minute to figure out who it was, and I'll talk to the student when I see her again on Tuesday. I also made sure everyone knew just how easy it is for the offended party to find out who posted it (the chatbox has an option that allows the creator to check the name/ISP of anyone who posts...how deliciously diabolical!).
I told one and all that this is their only warning. I hope no one else decides to be immature and leave a "your page sux lol!!1!11!" message. If they do, they'll be banned from the wiki, receive a zero on the next assessment, and we all get to have a Corleone-style sitdown with me, the student, their parents, and our AP. These are honors kids so I really doubt I'll have a problem:)
I told one and all that this is their only warning. I hope no one else decides to be immature and leave a "your page sux lol!!1!11!" message. If they do, they'll be banned from the wiki, receive a zero on the next assessment, and we all get to have a Corleone-style sitdown with me, the student, their parents, and our AP. These are honors kids so I really doubt I'll have a problem:)
Thursday, February 28, 2008
John Henry was a Steel Drivin' Man
Today is wikiciv grading time.
I had them come up with a rubric, but it's just how to get a C-. I'm trying something new there. And I have looked at them and I've come up with my grade, but I am going to do something UBER different for this first one.
I'm going to give them the rubric and tell them to fill it out and tell me what they think they should get. I'll compare scores then.
I'm having a bigtime problem with grading these, because I've found that when I grade them it turns into something mechanical and cold and...robotic. It really takes the shine off of these wikis and it reduces them to one of those old timey copier things (the ones where you roll it and it prints out. And it smelled SO YUMMY).
That's really how it's making me feel and when I started to report to them their grades (I even had it classy and assessment FOR learning, I posted on their comment boards), I could literally feel the energy disappearing from their enthusiasm for wikis.
I have to grade them but the way I'm grading them is sucking the life out of it and reducing wikis to "THIS IS WHAT I HAVE TO HAVE TO GET AN A" instead of "LET'S TELL SOME FUN STORIES ABOUT MY CIVILIZATION"
I'll let you know how this turns out.
I had them come up with a rubric, but it's just how to get a C-. I'm trying something new there. And I have looked at them and I've come up with my grade, but I am going to do something UBER different for this first one.
I'm going to give them the rubric and tell them to fill it out and tell me what they think they should get. I'll compare scores then.
I'm having a bigtime problem with grading these, because I've found that when I grade them it turns into something mechanical and cold and...robotic. It really takes the shine off of these wikis and it reduces them to one of those old timey copier things (the ones where you roll it and it prints out. And it smelled SO YUMMY).
That's really how it's making me feel and when I started to report to them their grades (I even had it classy and assessment FOR learning, I posted on their comment boards), I could literally feel the energy disappearing from their enthusiasm for wikis.
I have to grade them but the way I'm grading them is sucking the life out of it and reducing wikis to "THIS IS WHAT I HAVE TO HAVE TO GET AN A" instead of "LET'S TELL SOME FUN STORIES ABOUT MY CIVILIZATION"
I'll let you know how this turns out.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
Note for me
I just had this thought as I was looking over my kids' wikis. And if I don't write it down now, I'll forget. And if I write it on a paper, I may accidentally throw it away. So this for me, not you! :)
Know how American Idol has their theme week stuff? Well looking over these wikis I see so many varied styles of writing, from those who do just the imagery to those who are bare-bones and their writing is sparse and somewhat barren. So maybe I can tell my kids on Mon and Tues of whatever week that...
So this week is IMAGERY week! When you come up with some stories for your happy family, I want you to try to focus on giving me some really good visual descriptions (some will post pictures and that's okay too).
Then the next week:
So this week is DIALOG! When you write up your next fun and exciting story, I'd like to challenge you: try NOT to do much descriptive writing. Instead, try to let us know what happens through dialog. Imagine someone recorded the conversations and wrote them down.
Then the next week:
Come up with another story, but this time tell it from the point of view of someone NOT in the immediate family. Be creative! This and this happens, but the person telling it could be a rock or gerbil or a spatula. Whatever.
Anyway, ME, that's my little brain explosion for this Saturday. I am having so much fun reading these wikis. I guess it's kinda sad in a way, but I don't feel any guilt that I'm spending my Sat. afternoon reading their wikis.
DRAT I AM SUPPOSED TO INVITE MY GROUP TO MY WIKI ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!
Know how American Idol has their theme week stuff? Well looking over these wikis I see so many varied styles of writing, from those who do just the imagery to those who are bare-bones and their writing is sparse and somewhat barren. So maybe I can tell my kids on Mon and Tues of whatever week that...
So this week is IMAGERY week! When you come up with some stories for your happy family, I want you to try to focus on giving me some really good visual descriptions (some will post pictures and that's okay too).
Then the next week:
So this week is DIALOG! When you write up your next fun and exciting story, I'd like to challenge you: try NOT to do much descriptive writing. Instead, try to let us know what happens through dialog. Imagine someone recorded the conversations and wrote them down.
Then the next week:
Come up with another story, but this time tell it from the point of view of someone NOT in the immediate family. Be creative! This and this happens, but the person telling it could be a rock or gerbil or a spatula. Whatever.
Anyway, ME, that's my little brain explosion for this Saturday. I am having so much fun reading these wikis. I guess it's kinda sad in a way, but I don't feel any guilt that I'm spending my Sat. afternoon reading their wikis.
DRAT I AM SUPPOSED TO INVITE MY GROUP TO MY WIKI ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
Midweek update
Even though I said last update would be short, it wasn't. So this one WILL be short.
Reece, I'll give you the invite to it this weekend. I will post (on my school Sharepoint site) the rubric that the kids came up with. It'll just tell them what they need to do to get a C- (70%). We'll see how it goes. I'll also post some stories they've done.
Today I had my A4 class show me how they're citing things. We came to a consensus: they will have their work cited on a separate page.
Kyle (the history side of honors 9) and I have hammered over and over and over again how to do parenthetical citations MLA style, and works cited. They have to have those for their 10+ Time Travelers, and because I want these kids to view this not as a research paper, I'm going to be very lenient re: citing.
What I do want them to do is hyperlink the heck out of their stuff. This weekend will be my first grading of their work, and I told them I'd like them to go BACK through the stories they've written thus far and see if they can link to sites they already have (due to their Time Traveler assignments).
It's going good. I have one or two who haven't done a single bit, but they're also failing both history/english classes and they haven't done much of anything all year. And the worst part is that even AFTER we talk to the parents, they still want them
Nevermind. I'm just rambling now. So 3 weeks (3 weeks tomorrow) in and it is looking very very good. They've figured out how things go, now they're beginning to focus on the stories. And so far I am absolutely happy with them. I'll tell you the great fuzzy stories in weeks to come (like the girl who really hasn't done great work on papers thus far, but she is PSYCHO good with her wiki. I mean it's freakin' SICK how good it is).
Reece, I'll give you the invite to it this weekend. I will post (on my school Sharepoint site) the rubric that the kids came up with. It'll just tell them what they need to do to get a C- (70%). We'll see how it goes. I'll also post some stories they've done.
Today I had my A4 class show me how they're citing things. We came to a consensus: they will have their work cited on a separate page.
Kyle (the history side of honors 9) and I have hammered over and over and over again how to do parenthetical citations MLA style, and works cited. They have to have those for their 10+ Time Travelers, and because I want these kids to view this not as a research paper, I'm going to be very lenient re: citing.
What I do want them to do is hyperlink the heck out of their stuff. This weekend will be my first grading of their work, and I told them I'd like them to go BACK through the stories they've written thus far and see if they can link to sites they already have (due to their Time Traveler assignments).
It's going good. I have one or two who haven't done a single bit, but they're also failing both history/english classes and they haven't done much of anything all year. And the worst part is that even AFTER we talk to the parents, they still want them
Nevermind. I'm just rambling now. So 3 weeks (3 weeks tomorrow) in and it is looking very very good. They've figured out how things go, now they're beginning to focus on the stories. And so far I am absolutely happy with them. I'll tell you the great fuzzy stories in weeks to come (like the girl who really hasn't done great work on papers thus far, but she is PSYCHO good with her wiki. I mean it's freakin' SICK how good it is).
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
Still happy, still hope you are too!
Brief update. It's going well and I'll add y'all soon. You'll get an invite from PBWiki. Give 'em a password and log on. After you're done, make sure you log OFF, then go BACK to PBWiki and log in again (trust me). The first screen after your password screen, make sure you click on the pulldown bar that says somethin' like UPDATES. Click on the NEVER. Otherwise you'll get a thousand updates, and that will make you very sad. And angry. Mostly angry.
The kids are updating daily, and I'm spending about an hour each night looking through theirs and making comments. I'm careful not to tell them how they should do theirs. I'm letting them come up with everything on their own.
A4 class was given the job to figure out how we'll do our WORKS CITED. I don't want them to have to do them like their TT assignments (as I mentioned in previous update), but they also need to learn that they have to give credit when they borrow things. I've checked out their examples and we'll talk about it tomorrow (Thursday 2/14).
I haven't put together their rubric, but I have all the info. And on that note, I found that I focused TOO MUCH on the wikis the last 1.5 weeks. I haven't focused the students' attention on...say...OUR CLASS AND OUR WORK IN THE CLASS. That changed this week. We're back to reading (The Odyssey, my favorite old dead literature) and they don't have any time in class to work on it. Next week each class will get 30 minutes to go into the computer lab to work on them. I'll highlight the goods and the (very few) who haven't done much on them.
Already the kids are having a tough time organizing, and that makes me a hap hap happy boy! They're slowing figuring out how to organize their pages, and I hope this transfers over to their next TT assignment.
Also, I'm getting some great and intriguing stories here. Really! Captivating ones. To this extent, I hope their papers have more voice, more personality to them.
We'll see. Hi hi hi!
The kids are updating daily, and I'm spending about an hour each night looking through theirs and making comments. I'm careful not to tell them how they should do theirs. I'm letting them come up with everything on their own.
A4 class was given the job to figure out how we'll do our WORKS CITED. I don't want them to have to do them like their TT assignments (as I mentioned in previous update), but they also need to learn that they have to give credit when they borrow things. I've checked out their examples and we'll talk about it tomorrow (Thursday 2/14).
I haven't put together their rubric, but I have all the info. And on that note, I found that I focused TOO MUCH on the wikis the last 1.5 weeks. I haven't focused the students' attention on...say...OUR CLASS AND OUR WORK IN THE CLASS. That changed this week. We're back to reading (The Odyssey, my favorite old dead literature) and they don't have any time in class to work on it. Next week each class will get 30 minutes to go into the computer lab to work on them. I'll highlight the goods and the (very few) who haven't done much on them.
Already the kids are having a tough time organizing, and that makes me a hap hap happy boy! They're slowing figuring out how to organize their pages, and I hope this transfers over to their next TT assignment.
Also, I'm getting some great and intriguing stories here. Really! Captivating ones. To this extent, I hope their papers have more voice, more personality to them.
We'll see. Hi hi hi!
Wednesday, February 6, 2008
I am HAPPY! I hope you are too.
Going to keep this short because I only have 2 hours to check out all my wikis so I don't want to spend all my time yacking on here. I'll talk on here another time, i want to spend mucho time on the wikis so the students know I'm serious about it.
Some short points: I have ALMOST all my students fill out the survey form. A couple didn't. Boo.
PBWiki has lots of cool toys but I found that many have ad links for stupid spam MySpace crap sites. I emailed them and they apologized but said it's the deal they have with the widget people. So that sucks. I talked to all my classes about it and my kids have found ways to put the chat program on the site without ads (I have some crackerjack future hackers). The chat program is ONLY for everyone who is currently logged on PBWIKI so they can talk if they're on. It's good so far.
Same thing with music. They have dumb ads. But my @#$()*& kids have figured out a way to put music on without ads. God bless them.
This week each class went over what kinds of things I need to look for when I grade these. As something new, and because I got into a great discussion with my AP out the merits of rubrics (she hates them and thinks they're one reason our kids only strive for mediocrity), I decided we're going to come up with what everyone needs to do the BARE minimum. The rubric will be for a 70 (C-). i.e. this is what you need to have on your wiki to barely pass. I'll keep you posted on that one.
I have it set up so that I get updates on the hour. I have it piped into my special Outlook folder. It's so coool. I want to hug PBWiki. So far I would say 70-80 percent of my students play with their wikis at least once a day.
Kids are doing what I asked them to do this week: get on, play around with it, and get in contact with the other students in their civilization. EVERY STUDENT HAS DONE THIS.
I set up a helper elf chart on front page today and asked those HTML students who want to volunteer to help with the little things (background colors, videos, etc) can sign up so everyone knows who the experts are. This is the smartest thing I've done thus far.
I am extremely and absolutely happy with the way things are going so far. I'm going to wait a week before I give YOU the link. Some are almost viewer-worthy, most are still in their infancy stage.
Bye bye bye!
Some short points: I have ALMOST all my students fill out the survey form. A couple didn't. Boo.
PBWiki has lots of cool toys but I found that many have ad links for stupid spam MySpace crap sites. I emailed them and they apologized but said it's the deal they have with the widget people. So that sucks. I talked to all my classes about it and my kids have found ways to put the chat program on the site without ads (I have some crackerjack future hackers). The chat program is ONLY for everyone who is currently logged on PBWIKI so they can talk if they're on. It's good so far.
Same thing with music. They have dumb ads. But my @#$()*& kids have figured out a way to put music on without ads. God bless them.
This week each class went over what kinds of things I need to look for when I grade these. As something new, and because I got into a great discussion with my AP out the merits of rubrics (she hates them and thinks they're one reason our kids only strive for mediocrity), I decided we're going to come up with what everyone needs to do the BARE minimum. The rubric will be for a 70 (C-). i.e. this is what you need to have on your wiki to barely pass. I'll keep you posted on that one.
I have it set up so that I get updates on the hour. I have it piped into my special Outlook folder. It's so coool. I want to hug PBWiki. So far I would say 70-80 percent of my students play with their wikis at least once a day.
Kids are doing what I asked them to do this week: get on, play around with it, and get in contact with the other students in their civilization. EVERY STUDENT HAS DONE THIS.
I set up a helper elf chart on front page today and asked those HTML students who want to volunteer to help with the little things (background colors, videos, etc) can sign up so everyone knows who the experts are. This is the smartest thing I've done thus far.
I am extremely and absolutely happy with the way things are going so far. I'm going to wait a week before I give YOU the link. Some are almost viewer-worthy, most are still in their infancy stage.
Bye bye bye!
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Oops
I'm going to add my group's email addresses to my PBWiki page so that you can view it whenever you'd like. But I'll add it AFTER this weekend. I don't want you to see it in its bare-bones.
Going to wait until the students add just a FEW tiny things.
If you want access now, let me know. Otherwise I'll invite you on Tuesday (the next time all my classes will have met).
Going to wait until the students add just a FEW tiny things.
If you want access now, let me know. Otherwise I'll invite you on Tuesday (the next time all my classes will have met).
FIRST DAY
So I started wikis today. I think it went VERY WELL! We had to do some other things first, things that were very important (finish up reading projects and go over the haikus my students posted on my Sharepoint). That left us with 45 minutes. Not enough time!
Yesterday I wrote out my survey questions. I added as many as I could possibly think of. I figured when this is all over I can weed out the ones that end up being irrelevent. I'll post the questions on here sometime. I've got to send myself an email from school (blogspot is banned from all DoDDS Pacific servers and for good reason! There's a massive dearth of inappropriate blogspot sites out there for HS students). The survey questions are on my Sharepoint, so I'll get to those later.
I ran out of time for my A3 class. I forgot to have them take the survey. DANGIT DANGIT DANGIT! That's going to be troublesome because when they end up taking the survey on Monday, they'll have spent the weekend getting to know what a wiki is and I fear their survey answers will be inaccurate. Ugh ugh double ugh. I'll post a notice on my home page asking A3 kids to respond to survey during seminar tomorrow.
I had them working on eNotes (Cornell notes on a word document and they just submit it to my Sharepoint drop box) while I called them up one by one to give me their email addresses. Then they logged on and set their own passwords. I purchased the upgrade to Silver for one reason: so that each student has their own password to access the wiki. Oh, and because it has more memory space and some more functions.
Their assignment for this weekend is to put their contact email on the group project template on PBWiki. The other things they have to do are: contact the other member(s) in their civilization; figure out a family name and where in their civilization's history they want the happy family to begin their story; and spend at least 30 minutes getting to know/playing with the wiki. They know they are supposed to snoop around the other civilization wiki pages, but they are not allowed to alter the other civilization pages one single bit.
I showed them how I can check the history pages and how easy it is to revert it back to the previous copy. And, because I'm dealing with 14 and 15 year olds, I felt it encumbent upon myself to add, "please do not ever let me find out you tried to vandalize another civilization's pages."
I hated that I had to include that but...I want to cover all my bases. No one will, but I'm trying to plan for everything here.
The best part? This evening I was at my desk and I got a dozen notices of students who went on and played around with their wikis. That made me so very happy to see!
Next week we will come up with a grading rubric for the wikis, and we'll come up with project goals. As I said in my TIP, I do not want to tell them "you must have so-and-so amount of links, and so-and-so many pictures, videos, etc." I want them to be as creative with this as they humanly can.
Yesterday I wrote out my survey questions. I added as many as I could possibly think of. I figured when this is all over I can weed out the ones that end up being irrelevent. I'll post the questions on here sometime. I've got to send myself an email from school (blogspot is banned from all DoDDS Pacific servers and for good reason! There's a massive dearth of inappropriate blogspot sites out there for HS students). The survey questions are on my Sharepoint, so I'll get to those later.
I ran out of time for my A3 class. I forgot to have them take the survey. DANGIT DANGIT DANGIT! That's going to be troublesome because when they end up taking the survey on Monday, they'll have spent the weekend getting to know what a wiki is and I fear their survey answers will be inaccurate. Ugh ugh double ugh. I'll post a notice on my home page asking A3 kids to respond to survey during seminar tomorrow.
I had them working on eNotes (Cornell notes on a word document and they just submit it to my Sharepoint drop box) while I called them up one by one to give me their email addresses. Then they logged on and set their own passwords. I purchased the upgrade to Silver for one reason: so that each student has their own password to access the wiki. Oh, and because it has more memory space and some more functions.
Their assignment for this weekend is to put their contact email on the group project template on PBWiki. The other things they have to do are: contact the other member(s) in their civilization; figure out a family name and where in their civilization's history they want the happy family to begin their story; and spend at least 30 minutes getting to know/playing with the wiki. They know they are supposed to snoop around the other civilization wiki pages, but they are not allowed to alter the other civilization pages one single bit.
I showed them how I can check the history pages and how easy it is to revert it back to the previous copy. And, because I'm dealing with 14 and 15 year olds, I felt it encumbent upon myself to add, "please do not ever let me find out you tried to vandalize another civilization's pages."
I hated that I had to include that but...I want to cover all my bases. No one will, but I'm trying to plan for everything here.
The best part? This evening I was at my desk and I got a dozen notices of students who went on and played around with their wikis. That made me so very happy to see!
Next week we will come up with a grading rubric for the wikis, and we'll come up with project goals. As I said in my TIP, I do not want to tell them "you must have so-and-so amount of links, and so-and-so many pictures, videos, etc." I want them to be as creative with this as they humanly can.
Monday, January 28, 2008
It's ALMOST time
The new semester starts tomorrow (Tuesday). My classes are going to the computer room on Thursday and Friday to begin working with their wikis.
I spent this weekend weighing the pros and cons of using PBWiki and Sharepoint wiki and I even made a list...a physical list. Without further ado, I'm going with PBWIKI. Hooray!
It was the really boring and crummy layout of Sharepoint that tipped the scales.
I'm going to give them an online survey to fill out this week (using, funnily enough, the Sharepoint survey system). I'll be using questions I created in my TIP proposal last summer.
Speaking of my TIP, I found it but I can't figure out how to post it on this blog. So I'll just email it to y'all. I went back over it and I'm pretty much doing every single solitary thing on the TIP.
My principal is doing his Professional Growth Plan observation on Thursday, so that'll be fun and exciting! Now off to look at my group's TIPs.
I spent this weekend weighing the pros and cons of using PBWiki and Sharepoint wiki and I even made a list...a physical list. Without further ado, I'm going with PBWIKI. Hooray!
It was the really boring and crummy layout of Sharepoint that tipped the scales.
I'm going to give them an online survey to fill out this week (using, funnily enough, the Sharepoint survey system). I'll be using questions I created in my TIP proposal last summer.
Speaking of my TIP, I found it but I can't figure out how to post it on this blog. So I'll just email it to y'all. I went back over it and I'm pretty much doing every single solitary thing on the TIP.
My principal is doing his Professional Growth Plan observation on Thursday, so that'll be fun and exciting! Now off to look at my group's TIPs.
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