One Student at a Time

I really enjoyed building my personal learning environment around wine!  In addition to learning about different wines, I build some new relationships and had some fun with my friends.  It was easy to find blogs to read from Twitter.  It only took one request of people to follow about wine and I was off to the races.  Twitter is my go-to place for making connections and it made it super easy to find people to follow and blogs to read.  I even found some French people to follow and talk to.  I got brave and even commented on a blog in French!  Basically I have learned about the different types of wine and now have great people to ask if I have any questions.

A highlight of the experience was going to my first wine festival!  A PLE doesn’t only have to include people from far away!  Why not make the most of the people you have close to home too?  So I gathered some friends and we went to a wine festival that was just a few miles from my house.  It was great fun and I really learned about wines and found some local wineries that I will definitely go visit.

This week’s module could not have come at a better time!  My students are in the middle of their World Religions project and as part of that they have to interview someone who practices the religion they chose to study.  Finding people for them to interview hasn’t been too bad so far.  Here’s what I have:

Islam – a student from my adult ESOL class who is from Egypt and is Muslim will Skype into my class.

Hinduism – I found a nice person on Twitter who lives in England who is willing to Skype into my class next week!  Thank you, @KhandBapa!  @KhandBapa has a great blog too!  We also have a fifth grader who is Hindu and we are going to talk to him.  I think it is important for our students to know that we have people in our own backyard who practice these religions.

Shinto – I have asked on Twitter and will do so again, but we are rather leery of this.  With everything going on in Japan, my students and I talked about being respectful of everything that they are going through.  We decided to ask one more time, but will just go with the flow if no one offers.  I have a friend who lived in Japan for a few years and we may talk to him.

Buddhism – I didn’t get any responses to my request on Twitter except for some really funny jokes from @woodenmask.  I also follow the Dalai Lama on Twitter so I asked him if anyone could talk to my students, but I haven’t heard back yet.  :)

Judaism – Students will interview a 7th grade student in our school who is Jewish.  She has done presentations to our school before about special holidays and was thrilled to be interviewed by my 6th graders.

The interviews are happening next week so I’ll keep you posted on how they turn out!  My students last year interviewed Jabiz Raisdana, @intrepidteacher, about living in Doha, Qatar and it was a wonderful experience.  I’m hoping these will be the same!  My students will be writing their interview questions on Monday!

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For me, Twitter is where all of my PLE connections begin.  I even found out about the program at Florida on Twitter!

Wow.

Really that is all I can say.  I LOVE Symbaloo.  I think it is funny that I’ve never heard of it before.  I really wish I had this long ago.  I am using it constantly to organize my own websites.  I haven’t shown it to my students yet, but Michele and I are going to propose having all of our middle school students use it.  We have a planner that they all use, so why not have an online place for them that we all use?  Makes perfect sense to me!

I love how I can make a webmix and then share it with my students.  What a great way to share resources with them!  Michele and I helped Patty create her own and we stumbled upon a gold mine!  She is getting ready to do a Latin America unit in her Geography class and we found this amazing webmix that Mrs. Burgess made.

Symbaloo is definitely a tool that I can’t live without now!  I can’t wait to show it to my students.  Check out my webmix.  I also found a great webmix of wineries to visit!  What great tiles or webmixes have you found?

For my digital literacy plan, I created a lesson that I will be able to use in my adult ESOL class in May.  For the last three weeks of the year, we can do a special module.  At that time of the year, it is difficult to get students to attend class so anything we can do to make it more appealing helps.  In our regular class site, we have no internet access which just kills me!  For our last three weeks, we are going to meet at the local library so we can use their wireless Internet.  The class will consist of intermediate and advanced adult students.  Another teacher and I are bringing our classes together.  We have put together a brief outline of the entire module.  All of the links and videos will be on a wiki (still a work in progress) so the students can get to them easily.

The computer skills of these students vary greatly.  A few are very Internet savvy and use Facebook and email regularly.  A few of the students don’t even have a computer. One of the challenges with the module will be differentiating and being able to help all of the students.  Some won’t even know how to turn the computer on!  We definitely have our work cut out for us!

The students will have already learned about checking for valid sources on the Internet so this will continue that conversation into how to find photos.  A large goal of this module is to get them to question what they see on the Internet so they can be more savvy users.

Of all of the online tools that I use, Diigo is one of my favorites.  I absolutely love using it to save my bookmarks and it came in particularly handy last year when I was working from 3 different laptops at the same time.  No matter where I was, I always had my bookmarks handy.  I also like it because of the highlighting and sticky notes that you can put on websites.  Especially with all of the online reading I do, it is a great tool for note taking.  That way the highlights and notes are with the site and I can easily get to them if I have to go back and look at the article again.

Diigo Screenshot

I actually used to like Delicious better than Diigo.  I loved its elegant simplicity.  I didn’t need all of the extras that Diigo offered like notes and highlighting.  But then I wanted to start using Delicious with my students and it was a disaster.  There is no way to create student accounts with Diigo and I even emailed them to see if they could make some for me and the answer was a resounding no.  In order to create accounts for them, I had to make them yahoo id’s and that was not going to happen with my 6th graders.

So I jumped ship to Diigo and haven’t looked back.  Diigo lets you create student accounts without an email and they are simple to create.  My students love it!  They save their sites in it for my class and for their other classes too.  They put in annotations and share the sites to our class group so everyone can see them.  It is a great way for them to share good sites they have found.  When the Egypt revolution started, I had them find articles about what was going on and share them in our class group.  Then we started class each day reading through the articles we had all found.  They often put annotations to describe why the article was helpful.  They are 6th graders so sometimes their annotations are funny.  I had to agree with dafa17, though, the Egypt situation is insane!

Diigo Annotation

In my own learning, especially for my #PLEK12 class, I am using Diigo to find good sites about wine.  Google is overwhelming.  I got over 316 million sites when I searched for wine.  In Diigo, I got many sites, but I also can see what other people have said about that site and how many people bookmarked it.  That narrows down my search considerably and makes the search manageable.

Diigo is such a great tool.  How are you using it?

For my #plek12 course I get to learn about anything I want!

That should be a great thing, right?

So why am I so stressed out about picking a topic?

I think part of the problem is that I am way too obsessed with being the perfect student.  I definitely have major perfectionist issues.  If I don’t pick the perfect topic, how can I do everything I need to do?

Plus, I already learn about things that I am passionate about every day.  I love learning about teaching and learning.  But it feels like I should do something different.

That lead me down the slippery slope of…what do I like to do?  It is a Saturday night and I am at home doing my grad school work.  That should explain it all.  I teach full time, teach English at night, and am getting my MEd.  Pretty much everything I do revolves around teaching and learning.

The only other thing I do a lot is drink wine.  Now that sounds really bad, but I am fascinated by wine and love drinking learning about it.  We have a great wine store with a wine bar here in Fredericksburg and they have wine classes.  I took one with my friend Deb on French wines and I really enjoyed drinking learning about it.  I’ve always wanted to visit a vineyard and learn about how wines are made and see how it all works.  I think there is something very romantic about wine.

So, there it is.  I’m going to build a PLE around wine.  I am looking forward to finding some good wine blogs and friends who are also interested in wine.  I’m going to start a new blog just for my wine musings.  This will give me a chance to try out the Blogger that is in Google Apps for Ed (which I’ve wanted to do) and to have something that is about learning, but not related so closely to my teaching specifically.

I also am going to try using Symbaloo as my Wine PLE hub.  I just learned about this today in our readings and I would like to try it out to see if I would want my students to use it.

I’ll link my new blog here as soon as I upgrade our Google Apps for Ed stuff.  I just really know how to hav a good time on a Saturday night, don’t I?

Wall of Peace - Moscow by Jean-François Bauche

I am thrilled to be a part of the first open course offered by the University of Florida!  The best part for me is that I have a group of teachers taking it with me from my school.  I have loved so much of what I’ve done in my classes at UF and I am so excited to get to share it with my colleagues.  I sent out about 10 annoying emails to the whole faculty at school inviting them to take part in the course.  Quite a few asked for information and many expressed interest, but then weren’t sure about it.  Taking an online class for the first time can be very intimidating.    I think those of us who have done learning online, whether formally or informally, take for granted how intimidating it can be.  I was reminded of my first time in Elluminate, for example, it was a few years ago and I was crazy intimidated!

Five teachers are joining me!  We have met once and watched the archived Elluminate session.  Today they are meeting without me and we have a special guest teaching them how to set up and start blogging.  We were supposed to meet as a group on Wednesday, but I was home sick and I didn’t want us to get behind.  Don’t tell them yet, but one of my sixth graders is going to be their special guest and blogging expert!  She is a great kid and she picks up things really quickly and on numerous occasions has found a work around or an even better way of doing something we are doing.  I always tease her that she will make an excellent teacher some day!  Today after school, she will be helping the teachers become bloggers!  I can’t wait to hear how it goes!  I love that we are flipping the script and will have teachers as learners and student as teacher.  We really should do that more often!

My career goal is to become a tech integrator/mentor for helping teachers use technology effectively to enhance their own and student learning.  Taking this course with some teachers from my school gives me the opportunity to act as a mentor and learner right along with them.  It will be exciting to get to introduce them to the powers of a strong PLE because that is such a huge part of my own learning.  I am looking forward to my own learning, but also getting to be a part of my friends’ learning too.

Project Report #3

No revisions since Report #2

Goal, Objectives and Task Analysis

Goals:
Students will gain fluency in speaking French in classroom.
Students will add value to speaking by forging a relationship with other French speaking students outside of our classroom.
Students will engage in activities that work well with their multiple intelligences.
Students will provide feedback to teacher and reflect on the process of improving French speaking.

Goal Statement:
Students will use authentic speaking experiences and classroom experiences to increase fluency in French.

Project Report #2

One-to-one Formative Evaluation

Purpose: To see if increasing the number of kinsesthetic learning activities increased learning of writing section on quiz.

Audience: Eighth grade class of five French I-B students.

Procedures: Students used kinesthetic activities such as Dictation Races, to do advanced writing section on the quiz.

Dictation Races: Teacher puts note cards with sentences on each on the board. Each student takes turns running to the board and then back to their partner, dictating the sentence on the board for their partner to write down.  Teacher checks sentences when they think they are finished.  If they are not correct, they have to go back and fix them.  The first team to have all sentences correct win.

Materials: Quiz 5-1A Section C; Quiz 6-1A, Section C

Results:

As you can see, my top students were already able to write clear sentences using the correct spelling and grammar, but a huge improvement happened in my lower performing students. The student who improved the most, also had the highest bodily-kinesthetic scores on the Multiple Intelligences Test.

As a result of these drastic changes with my lower performing students, I will definitely incorporate more bodily-kinesthetic activities into my lessons. I will do at least one daily.

Small Group Evaluation

Purpose: To see if students were noticing changes in their learning because of the increased focus on French speaking.

Audience: Eighth grade class of five French I-B students.

Procedure: Students met with the teacher and answered questions together. Then, each student put his or her own answers on the Google Form.

01 Summertime Blues