On the Road with the South Paris Collaborative

Christine Southard and I recorded our conversation on our way home from NECC09. We speak each morning on the way to school, while we each drive long distances to get to work. We often think we should be recording these conversations. We will figure out a way soon. In the meantime, this conversation was recorded because we drove home together from Washington DC back to New York.

Enjoy!





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The Transformation of a 21st Century Classroom

My co-teacher, Christine Southard, and I speak each day on the phone as we drive into work. We both have long commutes and use the time to plan, wake each other up, make to-do lists, and just talk. We often think we should be recording these conversations and creating podcasts. Over time, we have solved all the education problems, found motivators for every unmotivated child, and figured out what each administrator needs to do to create the perfect school environment. Of course, we then get to school and forget all our great ideas. Sigh.

But last week, I got so excited by one conversation we had that I was determined to blog about it so it could be saved for posterity. Or at least saved for longer than it takes to walk from my car to my classroom. So here is the great thinking.

Christine and I have worked together for over three years. But three years ago we really began the transformation of our classroom. It was three years ago that we learned about Web 2.0 tools such as blogs, rss feeds, and delicious. And it was then that we began to spread our wings. So how have we transformed?

The Beginning

At first, we were excited by the tools. We started a blog for no other reason than we thought it was a cool idea. There was no great plan to integrate this idea into our curriculum. We didn't consider even coordinating blogging with our writing lessons. It was a total extra. Ditto for other fun tools such as mixbook, gcast, and adding widgets to our site. We already had a website, thanks to our district. Now we could add...a clustrmap, podcasts, a voki, video! Let's have the students create avatars for their blogsite. Let's play around with... Well, you get the idea. Tools were fun. Tools were cool. Tools excited the students. But there was no learning involved.

The Middle

Year two began a move toward putting technology into our curriculum. So our class went something like this. Teach a unit - maybe geometry. Use our cool SmartBoard to liven up the lessons. Maybe add a BrainPop video or Discovery Streaming video to the unit. Then find a way to have the students use a fun tool, such as VoiceThread, to demonstrate their knowledge.

So in year two, the tool still came first. We learned about a new tool and thought about a lesson we could do to incorporate that tool into our curriculum. And as for our teaching, it was still very much teacher directed. Assessments were often project based assessments but the learning was all about us.

There were some positives, though. We learned about a huge amount of tools, built up our PLN, and even won some awards for our projects. We were proud of our accomplishments.

The Big Transformation

So if we were happy, why did anything change? First, let me tell you what started the conversation Christine and I were having. I pointed out that we really don't "teach" much anymore. And that, to a stranger coming into the room, it must look like we aren't doing anything. We both sit with our computers on most of the day. We sit at tables and have students come to us with their work, usually on a laptop or flash drive. While we wait for students to come to us, we are editing blogs, loading videos, adding podcasts to our site, updating website pages, and much more. Or we walk around and talk to groups of students, finding out what they are working on and where they might need some guidance. Or we're monitoring a live blog session. Rarely are we in front of the room talking. And rarely are the students in their seats all at the same time. A colleague recently said that every time she walks by, the students are at their computers working quietly. We laughed, saying we felt the class was a pretty noisy group. They love to talk with each other and we are just grateful that at least they are on topic when they are talking.

How did we get to this level? At some point, over the summer, we realized that we needed to step away from the front of the room. And that technology could help us do just that. We wanted to move from project based assessment to project based learning. So we planned lessons where we posted information for the students online. Videos, audio clips, websites, book lists, all available as needed. And we demonstrated a variety of tools the students could use to share their knowledge. And we (gasp) handed out our toys to the kids. We gave them our cameras, our digital recorders, the flipcam. And now they even use our laptops when editing material. This was huge. We lost control. And gained a class full of learners. We trusted them with the tools and they haven't let us down yet.

So here we are, nearing the end of year three. Feeling proud, still winning awards. I wonder what year four will bring to us.

CoverItLive and Our Social Studies Lesson

Yesterday, we attempted something new in class and it worked so well I wanted to share. I should start by saying that usually, for social studies, we have our fifth graders working on projects. We have textbooks but primarily use them as reference books. There are two exceptions - chapter 14 and chapter 15.

There are two reasons for this. One is that, by the time we get to these units (government and Westward Expansion of the United States), we are usually way behind the other fifth grade classes. The other reason is that the background information given in the textbook is really laid out very nicely.

This year, we scrapped the government chapter for a PBL unit that took four weeks. Ordinarily, this chapter takes one week to cover. The projects were phenomenal, the children learned a great deal about the Constitution (even recognizing parts of it in President Obama's speech), and the students were quite engaged in social studies. You can see the projects here.

So here we are in January and now we are even further behind than normal. So, before starting our big pioneer simulation (check out Interact for some great simulation projects), we need to give the students the background information in chapter 15. And we need to do it relatively quickly. So I spend some time creating a SmartBoard presentation that will at least give the students more visuals than the textbook and we plan to pull out the textbooks.

Christine (my co-teacher) and I speak everyday on the phone while commuting to school. We use this time to celebrate successes, gripe about failures, plan and revamp lessons. Yesterday morning we talked about how boring the social studies unit was going to be. And we discussed our CoverItLive session we held during the Inauguration. The children were engaged, excited, and learning the whole day. Why couldn't we do that during social studies?

So we created and embedded a quick CoverItLive session on our website, chose three students who did a great job conversing during the inauguration and three more students who weren't bad. We sat them in the back of the room with computers and told them to log on. We instructed the three who were experts to pair up with the other three and teach them how to have a conversation in a chat room. Christine sat in back with them moderating the chat room. I stood in front and ran a teacher directed lesson right out of the text book with the rest of the class.

What happened was amazing. The six students who were blogging were extremely focused on the lesson because they were instructed to capture all the information for our site. The other 16 students were engaged in our discussion because it was a smaller, more intimate group. And they were motivated to be chosen to blog on the second day. The conversation that came out of the blog clearly shows a skill in recapping a lesson and will be useful for any students who missed the lesson or need reinforcement. You can see the conversation here. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find it.

Each time we use technology in a new way, I get excited once again. We have decided that we will use chapter 15 to teach the students how to properly and intelligently use CoverItLive. After that, we can offer computers to students during all our lessons. Some will love to have that "voice" and others, I am sure, will pass, preferring instead the live interaction between teacher and student. Either way, we have introduced one more way students can be successful in class. It was a good day.