Web 2.0 Compliments of AEE 526: Part II

Dabbleboard: The Whiteboard Reinvented.

Ultimate Research Assistant: Advanced Internet knowledge mining tool.

Zap Reader: Turn yourself into a speed reader.

english cafe: Improving English for everyone from ELL's native English speakers.

HowTo.Com: Find out "how to" almost anything.

Jing: Easily share your screen.

Mind42: A new way to create mind maps.

Web 2.0 Compliments of AEE 526

Glogster: Poster yourself.

Prezi: The new powerpoint.

iCurrent: Personalize your news.

CaringBridge: Keeping in touch when it matters the most.

issuu: Publish your own magazine

FunnelBrain: Flash card study groups

Hot Potatoes: The teachers puzzle/worksheet/quiz making best friend.

"Good morning class! Please clear your desks and take out your cell phones."

Cell phones have become quite the taboo in today's schools. Most schools have rules outlawing them totally thinking that cell phones are disruptive and distracting. One of my professors however asked a really interesting question: "Why?"

In our classrooms we have all kinds of technology that students have grown up using. And any of them have the potential to be a distraction to the students. But in moderation and under the supervision of teachers, they have all become enriching tools that not only enhance learning for students, but also make it more enjoyable.

So why can't cell phones be the same? Teaching methodology says that we should be capitalizing on what students are good at and what they enjoy doing when we're teaching. So why not integrate cell phones into our lessons?

For example, PollEverywhere.com (http://www.polleverywhere.com/) is an online tool that allows you to set up your own polls. Then your students can text in their answers and the website show a graphic representation of the results. This could be used in all SORTS of ways: learn more about what your students think, quiz them to see what they remember from class yesterday, get suggestions for future classes.

The sky is the limit with technology and chances are your students will not only learn more, they'll appreciate your efforts to integrate the world they live in with the world of the classroom.

Good fences make good neighbors, not good education.

A couple of months ago, the boyfriend brought home another dog. Though Edison, who we affectionately call "Eddy," was already 7 months old and mostly grown, he was the epitome of a new puppy. He ate everything, eatable or not. He woke me up at the crack of dawn nearly every morning by scratching whatever unfortunate part of me was sticking out of the covers. He wouldn't come in from the yard when it was raining until he was COMPLETELY covered in mud. No manners, no commands, no good.

Perhaps at first I was biased because I had raised Jasper and Helen from puppies. They know how to sit, lay down, and speak on command. They know what I mean when I say "Go to bed!" And they know how serious I am just by the tone of my voice. So needless to say, I had a hard time warming up to Eddy. By the time I did warm up to them though, I think he already knew that he wasn't my favorite. Whenever I was home alone, Eddy wouldn't come out and play in the living room with me and the other dogs. He laid in Michael's room until he got home. When Helen and Jasper cuddled up in bed with me, Eddy laid on the floor. It broke my heart that I had judged him so harshly and hadn't put the effort in but he seemed to have accepted it and just waited for Michael.

Last week, I was sitting at home alone catching up on Dr. Quinn. All of the dogs were in the fenced back yard. Just as Dr. Mike rushed off to rescue passengers injured in a train wreck, someone anxiously knocked on my door. A nervous man who I recognized as one of my neighbors all but shouted before the door was even completely opened: YOUR DOG GOT OUT! I asked him to describe the dog and knew immediately that it was Eddy. It seemed that he had found a way to jump the back fence and had landed in the apartment complex on the other side.

I grabbed the leash and followed the man to where he'd last seen Eddy and there he was: sitting, staring up at the fence, trying to figure out how to get back inside. He saw me and immediately hung his head in shame but I couldn't be angry. He was TRYING to get back to where he was supposed to be, he just needed help. I rubbed his ears, told him he was a good boy, and picked up all 50 pounds of him and carried him home.

Since then, Eddy has learned to sit and he doesn't jump on my head anymore when I bend over to pour food into his bowl. He follows me all over the house and lays at my feet in the bed now (much to Jasper's dismay.) So what made the difference? The only thing I can think of is that when Eddy was stuck on the outside of the fence I went after him. When I came to his rescue, maybe he realized that I do care, that my house is his home, and that he can be a part of what's going on inside the fence.

More than one of my wise professors has told me, "Kids don't care what you know, until they know how much you care." How many of our students today are just like Eddy? Sitting outside the fence, knowing that they need to be inside, they NEED an education, and wanting to be inside but not knowing how to get there? As teachers, it's our job to go after those students outside the fence. They need our guidance to help break down those fences that stand between them and their education: learning disabilities, lack of motivation, family responsibilities, sickness, worry, doubt, fear. They need our encouragement to know they can learn and succeed on the inside. And they need to know that they're not just another test score, IQ, or ID number; that they're cared about and they deserve an education as much as anyone else.

When I was student teaching, I taught a student named *Mark. When I met Mark, he was 15 years, 324 days old. Mark was only in school because the law said he had to be. I didn't know anything about him when I started teaching him, so I taught him the same as the rest of the students. I had the same high expectations and the same amount of respect. Though at first he was reluctant, he became really interested in Horticulture. He did well on his tests, answered questions and participated in class often. Even though it was first period, he rarely missed a day. When he DID miss a day, I always bugged him until he completed the makeup work. Though more than one teacher in the school had said that he was just biding his time until the day he could drop out, I was optimistic. What I didn't realize is that even though I had gone after Mark, everyone else had given up on him. He had been outside the fence for so long that no one else thought it was even remotely possible for him to make it inside the fence... and no one tried to find out.

The day that Mark turned 16, he came to my first period class, then he left the school and never returned. And I can't help but wonder, if more teachers had gone after him and would go after those like him, how might things have been different on both sides of the fence?

Mommy, do I have a pistil, too?

If you've ever spend a spring in Raleigh, you know that at this time of year is often affectionately known as "pollegeddon." Pollen from every plant in the city seems to be dispersed at the exact same moment covering cars, playgrounds, and sinus cavities in a thick layer of yellow misery. So needless to say, outdoor activities are frightening to say the least.

Earlier this week I was babysitting a little girl I have come to believe is either my long, lost niece or just a miniature version of me. At 6 years old, she wants to know everything and already knows a lot more that your typical 6 year old. This week, as we were making alternate plans because the pollen had demolished the local park, she asked her mom: "Why do we have pollen?" Her mom stumbled a little but gave a semi accurate, hardly scientific explanation and then said: "Liz knows more about it than me. You should ask her."

*insert dear in headlights look here*

My mind started spinning. How do you explain sexual reproduction of plants to a 6 year old without eliciting some sort of questions about sexual reproduction in PEOPLE (A topic I am simply not qualified or comfortable talking to a 6 year old about.) Quickly, I responded: "Your mom's right!" and tried to change the subject.

Though I had dodged the "birds and bees" bullet for the moment, I thought all the next day: How do you explain pollen to a 6 year old? How do you lay aside the science-y words and technical jargon stuff to explain the basic concept of pollen?

As I was sorting this out in my brain it occurred to me that even though I have a minor in horticulture and have taught this concept to high school students more than once, it was still a challenge to try to transpose what I knew into something that a 6 year old could understand. This was a whole new level of comprehension for me.

If this experience was such a challenge to me, the teacher, imagine how powerful this tool could be to encourage higher order thinking in students? Ask them to take a concept you're working on and put it into terms that someone from a different walk of life could understand: a 6 year old, a 90 year old, an alien from Mars. Just the process such an activity would lead your students through would challenge them to really think and could be the difference between a mediocre understanding and total mastery of the content.

New toys

Wordle http://www.wordle.net/
Wordle was introduced to me when I was student teaching and not only is it FUN, it's also really useful in a variety of ways. Take any body of text and paste it in and Wordle will turn it into a "beatiful word cloud". Every time a word is used, it appears larger in the word cloud. It's hard to describe in words, yet the words sometimes describe it best.
From Desiderata by Max Ehrmann


Sporcle http://www.sporcle.com/
Warning: Sporcle has the potential to be totally addictive. It's a collection of timed quizzes on a variety of lists. You can make your own or use the ones already there. Either way, inside the classroom or out, this is a great way to spruce up sometimes boring but necessary rote memorization type tasks.

Apparently you are not supposed to use allergy eye drops with your contacts.

One of my dearest friends from undergrad is now teaching Ag in Eastern North Carolina. On Friday she sent me an email:

Apparently you are not supposed to use allergy eye drops with your
contacts.

Do you know what will happen?

It will dilate your eyes.

I did not wear my contacts today or yesterday because my eyes were
bothering me. allergies. So I got some allergy eye drops the Visine
kind.

Today before second period I went to put my contacts back in because my
eyes felt better.

My left contact went it good. My right one wanted to be a turd and it
had something on it when I put it in my eye and so it immediately had to
come out. I did not have my solution....but I did have some eye drops!
Same thing right? WRONG!!!!

Then the bell rang for second period and I was getting somethings ready for class when one of the kids was like "what's up with your eyes?!?" I was like "I don't know, what?" He was like "one of your eyes is bigger than the other." I freaked out but tried to play it off.

So needless to say I look like a freak. And I did some Googling and
found out that this has happened to other people who had the same
reaction as me. Freaking out.

When I finished laughing hysterically, I realized that this was a perfect example of a cardinal rule of teaching: ALWAYS BE PREPARED!

You never know when your contact will fall out, your pants will rip, or you'll have an unfortunate incident while mucking stalls out at the barn. So you have to be prepared: spare set of clothes, coveralls, glasses or more contacts, and the right kind of eye drops, just in case.

Walking the walk

I'm not sure what this says about my ability to relax on break but..

Just for fun, I'm reading a text book on classroom management The first chapter talks about identifying the cause of behavior problems and one of the potential causes is demands and prohibitions: your expectations.

One paragraph says:

"Sometimes teachers state one set of expectations verbally but in subtle ways convey a different set of expectation through their non verbal behavior."

Thinking back, I was terrible at this. I would set the expectation that students needed to raise their hands to speak, but then in class discussion, I would respond to students who didn't raise their hands. I would set the expectation that cell phone were NOT allowed but then give students several chances to put them away. During my whole student teaching experience, I saw cell phones every day, but never took a single one away.

Now I see that every time I changed the expectation, I just confused my students. They were never quite sure which rules I was enforcing, which ones I wasn't and which ones I thought were important. And I have no doubt that if I had tried to start enforcing some of those rules mid semester there would have been chaos!

When I set expectations for my students, I have to be sure to enforce them; the same way, every day. Students need consistency. They need to know what to expect. As a teacher, I have to walk the walk when managing my classroom so that my students have the best opportunity to learn.

--Kauffman, J. M., Mostert, M. P., & Trent, S. C. (2002). Identifying behavior problems. In D. P. Hallahan (Ed.), Managing classroom behavior: A reflective case-based approach (pp. 3-20). Boston, MA: Allyn & Bacon.

Cover your assets...

**For that often dry lesson on assets and liabilities:
Have the students draw their dream farm. (If they don't want to farm, maybe a dream house, or dream business.) Then have them go through and create an inventory list and determine what their assets and liabilities are. Then have them assign value to each item and determine their net worth.

Go get me a bucket of steam...

Some thoughts:

**If you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never do anything creative.

**If you're green, you're growing. If you think you're ripe, you're about to rot.

**You don't know what you don't know.

**What am I doing as a teacher to get my student's best efforts?

**If someone questions my students about agriculture, I want them to be able to confidently, accurately, and passionately defend it and advocate for it.

A new beginning...

I've played with blogs over the years, usually only utilizing them when I needed to vent or rant. That's not helpful or interesting for anyone and probably not very healthy for me.

Also, over the years, I've kept a variety of notebooks to try to keep track of the things that I've learned on my way to becoming a teacher. Funny stories, interesting thoughts, and activities to try have scattered the pages of composition books and the corners of my notes for the last 5 years. Today, I set about trying to find all those ideas and thoughts but to no avail.

So I've developed a solution: I'm going to use my blog to keep up with the ideas and tips so that when it's time to use them, I'll be able to find them. And maybe, somewhere along the way, others will stumble upon my ideas and leave theirs in exchange for mine.