Treasures MacMillan McGraw Hill Supplement

Kelly Tenkely15 Comments on Treasures MacMillan McGraw Hill Supplement5331 views

I am not a fan of canned curriculum.  It has some benefits and is relatively easy to teach, but there is a lack of differentiation for different learners and the activities for practice are often shallow.  Treasures has some fun stories and themes but they are really lacking in their activities to practice the essential learning.  The activities are often shallow and don’t change from first grade to fifth grade.  The same copy from the dictionary activity is suggested for learning vocabulary for every unit in every grade level.  I created the Treasures supplement as a way to help teachers provide students with multiple ways of practicing the essential learnings.  I just finished the supplement for unit 1.  This is the supplement for first through fifth grade.

Storybook Web

Kelly Tenkely3 Comments on Storybook Web3698 views

What it is: Storybook Web is “based on popular children’s stories by authors Scoular Anderson, Debi Gliori, Mairi Hedderwick and Frank Rodgers.”  There are a number of fun activities on this site including the ability to listen to the author’s reading excerpts from their stories and answering questions about how they came up with ideas for writing.  Students can choose from one of eight stories, each story has a related game, word bank activity, and videos/audio for reading the story and interacting with the author.

How to integrate Storybook Web into your curriculum: Storybook Web is a fun way for students to interact with stories, making connections to the authors of the stories and the themes that they are reading about.  This site helps students think like an author.  It gives them an inside look at how authors think about writing.  Use this site as an introduction to a writing activity.  Students can watch the author videos and get an inside look at the process that a writer goes through.  This can be done using a projector connected computer or interactive whiteboard.  Storybook Web would also make a nice addition to a writing center on classroom computers.  When I taught second grade, I set up an “editing and publishing” center on my classroom computers.  Here I gave students access to an online dictionary, thesaurus, word processor/publishing program, and Read Write Think.  Storybook Web would be an excellent addition to a writing center.  Students can go to be inspired, encouraged in the writing process, and given a place to practice their own writing.  I like the word bank on Storybook Web, word choice is hard for beginning writers.  By interacting with the word bank activity on Storybook Web, students will begin to think about their own word choice.  You may want students to go through their own writing and pick out words that they would add to their word bank.  I have found that activities like this make students think about the words they are using.  Often, students will self-edit and find richer vocabulary to use in their writing.

Tips: This is an easy website for emergent readers and writers to navigate.  Students can choose to have the site narrated for them or they can turn the audio off and read on their own.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Storybook Web in your classroom!

Reform Symposium: George Curous

Kelly Tenkely1 Comment on Reform Symposium: George Curous1054 views

The Reform Symposium is in full swing, George Curous is our first session!  His presentation is titled: Identity Day-Revealing the Passions of Our Students.

I hope that you were able to join us, here are the notes I took during the session:

  • Identity day- near the end of the year
  • School philosophy- relationships are central to everything they do, everyone has the ability to be a leader, recognition of the whole person, effective teaching leads to effective learning. Learning must be relevant to the student.
  • Never pass a student without saying something (whether they are in your classroom or not).
  • Distributed leadership, find strengths and capitalize on those strengths.
  • Everything that we do is based on the best interests of the students and then work backward from there.  If you focus on that the confrontations are reduced.
  • Dan Pink’s What’s Your Sentence Video
  • Everyone needs to find their sentence. We aren’t preparing kids for the real world: this is the real world.
  • The “Why” of the day: Identity day was a staff initiative.  A science fair activity where students could set up displays and tell one thing that they are passionate about.  Everyone in the school did this: teachers, students, admin, staff.  “What is one thing about you that you really would love to share about yourself?  Think of the different ways you can share this with others and create some type of display to show your passions.”
  • This was about everyone getting to know each other.  (k-6 school)
  • Keep it simple-share ONE thing!
  • Work as partners with parents.
  • The entire school community was invited.
  • If you take 2 min. a day to learn about the “problem child” by the end of the year they won’t be a problem any more.

I recommend you take a look at this great session so you can see all of the awesome examples of Identity day!

See the recorded session here.

Reform Symposium: Opening Keynote Steve Hargadon

Kelly Tenkely2 Comments on Reform Symposium: Opening Keynote Steve Hargadon2254 views

This weekend is the Reform Symposium eConference, 48 hours of free learning! I am going to do my best to keep notes of all of the great conversations and learning when I am not moderating or sleeping 🙂

This was the opening keynote by Steve Hargadon:

  • Information overload vs. Web as a conversation
    We have to get past our perception that participation is only for the elite. Everyone is a participant and a creator.
    The answer to content overload is to create more content because our paradigm shifts and we start seeing everything as conversation.
  • Our students hold in their hands technology that was the stuff of dreams when we were growing up. They are incredible devices for learning. Learning is everywhere.
    We are seeing an amazing shift toward openness. Consider Wikipedia that in a relatively short amount of time an open encyclopedia took the place of a cultural institution.
    MIT is now providing classes to free when anyone goes online. The value is no longer in the specific content but in being actively engaged and they are doing something that is valuable to humanity by providing this openness.
  • Flexbook- online open virtual textbook initiative. This will bring value and save money.
  • Participation is being reinvented, it is a return to participation. It is a pre-broadcast, pre-factory, un-consumer model. This is dramatically changing the lives of youth because their lives are largely interactive.
  • Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, and Myspace are showing us a new model of growth and success that is driven by consumer demand instead of top down economics.
  • Linux is running Google’s servers.  This is incredible!
  • Volunteerism 2.0- we have always recognized value of volunteering but we are now seeing the opportunity to volunteer and participate in ways that weren’t possible before.  Clay Shirky calls this the “Redistribution of Our Cognitive Surplus”.  We are spending time creating instead of consuming.  This is unleashing energy.  Clay Shirky Ted Talk.
  • This is a change in structure it is participative (like democracy).  The Internet is doing this for content and knowledge.  We need the same structure in education.
  • We have to move toward the freedom end of the structure in schools.  We aren’t used to thinking this way.  It is possible for students to be their own driver in education.
  • We are organizing without organizations. What used to take financial resources to pull together to get something happening, doesn’t require that any more.  (Case in point the Reform Symposium conference!!)
  • Wikis let us organize information the way we want them, post at our convenience (not every day like a blog), but social networking has been widely adopted in a way wiki’s and blogs weren’t.  Social networking opened the door to the participation and conversation and made it easy to come in.  Blogs take longer to get the conversation going. Wikis are a little more complex and have a learning curve.  Social networking aggregated web 2.0 tools in a single location.  Facebook is now up to 500,000,000 members.
  • Steve started Classroom 2.0 and it now has 45,000 members, social networking is valuable to the education world.  It gives peer-to-peer practice sharing and conversation.
  • We have to get over that social networking is a dangerous place to be.  It will become the framework structure of the educational experience.
  • Communication platform: social networking + learning management system + live collaboration
  • It makes us rethink how teaching and learning take place.
  • We have to ask how well are we preparing students for this world and how prepared are we from this world?
  • Principles of school 2.0: contributing, collaborating, creating.
  • The best way to predict the future is to be it: Be a learner first, we need great teachers to be a part of the conversation and figure out how to harness web 2.0’s inherent capabilities, keep perspective-students need really great teachers more than ever, join an educational or social network (lurking is allowed), become a part of the conversation and encourage others to do so, help collaborate to build a new playbook and be a voice in the public discussion (Twitter #edchat!!), embrace the change process (this is going to be a wild ride, it is going to challenge the way we think).

Find the recording of the Keynote here.

My iPad Journey

Kelly Tenkely13 Comments on My iPad Journey3448 views

The story above is meant to be an illustration of the school/learning experience.  The first explorer’s journey represents the traditional school model.  Here, students are given set tools and led in one direction down a river of scripted curriculum and standardized tests.  Some wonderful things are learned along the way, but there is little freedom to stop and explore more.  This is further limited by the tools provided that allow for little or no discovery.  On this journey there is a single goal in mind: graduation.

The second explorer represents a rich learning experience made available when the proper tools and experiences are made available.  In this model, there is still a destination and objective, but the journey is one of discovery, adventure, and opportunity.  On this journey, students are given the resources that will allow them to explore and learn at their own pace, deepening the learning experience and passion for  a life of learning.  While there are many resources that could enrich the learning experience and help students on this journey of discovery, the tool I am recommending is the iPad.

I choose the iPad over other devices (such as netbooks) because it is an intuitive device (particularly for the elementary level) that puts the focus on the journey unfolding.  Other devices may be cheaper, or offer Flash, or allow multi-tasking but these devices get in the way of the journey because they must be learned before the journey can even begin.  These type of devices can end up being THE journey because there is a learning curve for using the device.  The iPad is brilliant in its simplicity.  Students can pick it up and immediately understand how to navigate and use the device with little guidance.  The iPad offers portability not available in other devices.  It is the go-anywhere, all day learning device that allows students to explore, communicate, and collaborate at their own pace and in their own way.

In the current school system, students aren’t afforded the luxury of having the teacher to themselves all day.  The iPad can fill some of this void by guiding learning, offering instant feedback, giving the ability to pause-rewind-replay learning, and allowing students to learn collaboratively.  This frees the teacher to spend more time guiding students individually on their individual learning journey.

As I have written previously, one device may not make sense in every school, in every classroom.  In another demographic, the cellphone may be the best portable learning device.  I am proposing an iPad study pilot program because for my students at my school, the iPad is the right tool for the journey.  I have had an average of 400 students each year.  I know every one of them by name.  I know many of their families.  I know their hobbies, interests, fears, and passions.  Being a computer has afforded me the opportunity to teach these kids every week of their elementary school lives.  I know these kids. The iPad is the device that would make the second explorer’s journey possible for them.

Before the school year was over, an idea formed to start a 1-to-1 iPad pilot program in first and fifth grade (180 students).  I decided to make this program a formal research study to find out what affect the device really had on student learning and achievement.  I wanted the results of this program to be farther reaching than my school and my students.  It is my hope that by turning this into a research study, not only would my students be given the best, but others could benefit from the results.  Perhaps we could provide the road map of how to implement a 1-to-1 iPad program.  I wrote out my proposal and immediately sent out a tweet asking if there were any research professors or graduate students who might be interested in something like this. Many from my PLN responded positively with help, Jason Schmidt was the one I chose.  Then, I got the wild idea to take the study to another level and sent my proposal to Robert Marzano and Debra Pickering.  They agreed to partner with us on research!  The problem?  We are still working out a way to fund this project.

Below is a pared down version of my proposal:

Objective/Purpose of Study
The purpose of this pilot program is to examine the effectiveness of the Apple iPad multi-touch, mobile device on student achievement and learning in a 1-to-1 environment.  The iPad mobile device will be used to augment instruction, differentiation, inquiry learning, and innovative classroom practice with a focus on reading/English language arts and Math.  Reading/English language arts and math are the primary focus of the study since these are the two subjects that all states have been required to develop assessments under the No Child Left Behind Act.1   The study will also seek to determine if instructional practices are influenced by the use of iPad mobile devices in the classroom.

Goals
The goal of this pilot program is to provide a 1 to 1 mobile device learning environment which will:

  • Provide consistent access to technology for a fully integrated learning experience by providing each student with an iPad mobile learning device for use inside and outside the classroom.
  • Make provisions for on demand learning opportunities which will expand the reach of the classroom with the iPad learn-anywhere platform (applications, podcasts, video, e-books all selected for individual learning needs).
  • Allow for customized, individualized content to meet each student’s unique learning needs.4
  • Increase student motivation and engagement in learning.5
  • Increase collaboration among students and teachers resulting in improved achievement.6
  • Provide students with student-focused instruction that is multi-level (for different student abilities), multi-sensory (for different learning styles), and individualized.7
  • Provides students with immediate feedback on learning.8
  • Provides teachers with the ability for immediate and individualized learning assessments.

Questions to Address

  • How can the iPad mobile learning device influence student achievement?
  • How can use of the iPad improve student motivation, attitude, and interest in learning?
  • How can the iPad mobile learning device be introduced into curriculum and instruction effectively?
  • What learning strategies are most effective in instructional applications of the iPad?
  • How can the iPad be used to extend learning beyond the classroom and school day?
  • In what ways can implementation of the iPad be a catalyst for a restructuring of school?
  • What are effective ways of evaluating the impact of mobile learning devices on teaching and learning?
  • Will there be an increase in student ability to use classroom or computer lab computers?
  • Will there be a change in the way teachers think about the use of mobile technologies?
  • Will there be a change in the process of learning from being largely teacher centered, to student centered as a result of the introducing the iPad?
  • Will there be a greater sense of student ownership, responsibility, and empowerment in their own learning (how does this differ in 1st grade to 5th grade)?
  • Will students use technology more purposefully to complete a task or discover new information?
  • Will there be a change of teacher’s philosophy, pedagogy, or approach to the learning process?

Conclusion
The iPad pilot program offers something innovative in the classroom.  It provides the potential to empower and uplift students in their learning.  To maximize effectiveness, education in the 21st century has to be active, engaged, and customized for students.  Students must have universal access to mobile technologies that will enable critical thinking, differentiation, and problem solving.  It is our belief that the technology in Apple’s iPad meets these needs and more.

I tell you all of this because we are still searching for funding.  We have applied for grants, talked with individuals, entered contests, emailed Steve Jobs, etc., etc., etc.  I am stubborn.  I refuse to believe that money is going to be the thing to stop us in our tracks.  I refuse to believe that in all of my PLN, Twitter, and Facebook connections that there isn’t an answer.  Surely Twitter shrinks the six degrees of separation between me and someone who can help get this moving.  Surely someone knows someone, who knows someone who can make this happen.

So here is my plea:

I am convinced that with your help I can get this program started and that our ripples will be felt throughout the education community.

iPad Curriculum

Kelly Tenkely12 Comments on iPad Curriculum2347 views
http://www.flickr.com/photos/3gstore/4745626595/

I must be crazy, that is the only explanation I have for starting yet another blog!  iPad Curriculum is a new blog I am starting today where I will post app and web app reviews, highlight educational tools that work seamlessly on the iPad/iPod Touch/iPhone, and give tips and tricks for using the iPad/iPod Touch in the classroom.

If you follow my blog regularly, you know I am working on an iPad research study with elementary students (help with funding by voting here).  I thought that as long as I was collecting and reviewing all of these resources, I should share them with all of you!  I’m not sure how frequently I will be posting yet, it may be once a day or several times a day depending on what I find and what I have going on.  For now, there is one lonely post but it will give you the idea of what the blog is all about.

Reform Symposium Virtual Conference Call for Moderators

Kelly Tenkely4 Comments on Reform Symposium Virtual Conference Call for Moderators3564 views

I am so excited!  The Reform Symposium Virtual Conference is just around the corner.  The line up of Keynote speakers and presenters couldn’t be better and we are putting the finishing touches on making sure the conference goes without a hitch.  If you are planning to attend the conference, we would love to have you join the Reform Symposium social media site.  By registering on the site, you will also be entered in raffles to win some incredible prizes, check them out here.

As we are getting ready for the big days (July 30, 31 and August 1), would you consider volunteering some of your time to help moderate the sessions?  You would be co-moderating the Elluminate session with either Shelly, Chris, or me.  I am happy to train anyone who needs to be trained on how to moderate using Elluminate.  As a moderator, your job would be to help the presenter check their audio prior to the session, record the session, introduce the presenter, and help field questions from the audience.  Not to mention that you get a backstage pass to some of the BEST presenters in education.  If you can help out, please contact me via Twitter by reply or DM or you can leave a comment below offering your help.

I hope to see you all there, can’t wait for the opportunity to get such amazing professional development without leaving home!

Answer Garden

Kelly Tenkely9 Comments on Answer Garden5187 views

What it is: I learned about Answer Garden from an interactive post on Suzanne Whitlow’s excellent blog, Suzanne’s Blog.  Answer Garden is a “new minimalistic feedback tool.”  It can be used as an online answer collection tool or embedded on a website or blog.  An Answer Garden is created as easily as entering a question and clicking create, no registration needed.  Embed the Answer Garden on any blog, website, or social network page using the embed code provided.  You can also give students a direct link to the Answer Garden. Students can post answers to your questions by entering their own answers or by clicking on and submitting existing answers.  All of the answers are represented in the form of a word cloud.   25 answers are visible per garden but as students submit the same answer, that word will grow bigger.  Creating an Answer Garden is SO simple.  Just type in your question or brainstorm statement and click create.

How to integrate Answer Garden into the classroom: Answer Garden is a fun way for students to brainstorm, plan, and work together.  Pose open-ended thinking questions on your classroom blog or website for students to answers.  Use Answer Garden to host a classroom poll.  Create a geography Answer Garden that gives students a place that they can describe a state or country they are learning about.  Use Answer Garden during reading as a place for students to reflect on different characters, plots, settings, and themes.  In history, give students a date range, event, or historical figure and let them add words to the Answer Garden that describe.  In the primary classroom, type in a phoneme combination and have students submit words that fit the phoneme rule.   Create an answer garden to recognize VIP students in your classroom where each child can answer with a character quality that they appreciate about that student.  The possibilities are endless!  This tool is SO easy to use, try it out in the Answer Garden below.

Where will use Answer Garden?… at AnswerGarden.ch.

Tips: The default settings on Answer Garden only allows students to submit one answer.  You can check the optional “Unlimited Answering” to give students multiple opportunities to submit answers.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Answer Garden  in your classroom.

Energyville

Kelly Tenkely11 Comments on Energyville3905 views


What it is: Energyville is a game sponsored by Chevron.  In the game, students have to provide enough power to meet the energy demands of a city with a 5.9 million person population.  As they play, they must keep the city prosperous, secure, and clean.  The energy decisions that students make for the city in 2015 are based on current lifestyles and the projected energy demands and costs for developed countries in North America, Europe, and Asia.  The Energyville game environment is a lot like SimCity in the way that students build and maintain the city.  Students begin by dragging energy sources to the city to bring it to life.  Students can choose from biomass, coal, hydro, natural gas, nuclear, petroleum, solar, and wind.  As they add energy sources to the city, they can observe the impacts on the economy, environment, and security of the city.  The goal is to keep the impact low.  There is a comparison chart where students can view the impact of the different energy sources on the environment, economy, and security to aid them in their decision-making.  As students move their mouse over the different energy sources, they can read about that energy source in the Energy Advisor panel.

How to integrate Energyville into the classroom: Energyville is an excellent simulation game that helps students to experiment with energy sources.  They are able to see the way that their decisions directly affect people and the environment.  Students can see how some energy sources may have a low impact on the environment but are high in cost or impact security.  This is a great way for students to weigh decisions and defend their choices.  Set students up in a computer lab setting where each student has their own computer.  Give students a set amount of time and see which students can get the highest score (lowest impact) on their city in that time.  Afterward, discuss the best and worst energy sources, and have the highest score walk the class through their strategy.  If you don’t have access to a lab, you can send students to Energyville in small groups as a center activity on the classroom computers.  You could also play as a whole class with an interactive whiteboard or projector-connected computer.

Tips: There are two levels of game play.  In the first level, students make decisions to meet the city’s energy demands in 2015.  In the second level, they must make additional decisions to prepare for the energy demands of 2030.

Please leave a comment and share how you are using Energyville in your classroom.