New Ideas from My PLN This Weekend
Teaching for the first time in many years is so very exhausting. I'm teaching 5th grade at an urban school in Los Angeles.
I study the curriculum each night, make lesson plans according to the guides in the teacher's editions, and then I curse myself every day because the lessons are uninviting and boring. Students are turned off and so am I. I need to make everything more student centered and engaging. I use the SMARTBoard, make presentations of vocabulary and lessons, but it is still too teacher directed. I have enough technology for almost 2:1, but I'm not leveraging the potential yet in ways I know can engage students. We've started blogs, and students know how to log in to their vendor math site and a few other didactic sites, but we haven't begun to really create in innovate ways yet. Like I said, it's just so exhausting trying to follow the curriculum to make sure students score well on the CST's. How do I turn this roadblock on it's ear and make sure students need to know what is required, yet make it engaging? I'm so fortunate to be connected in my PLN with so many amazing educators who know how to think outside the box. Each weekend, through Twitter, my RSS Reader, my Google Certified Teacher group, and Google Plus, I find new ways to engage students. I fill myself with enthusiasm and hope that I can make the curriculum more engaging, student centered, and creative. This week, I revisited Voki, as a discussion about it had sprouted in my Google Certified Teachers group. I hadn't used it in ages, since I had very little use for it except for showing it to teachers in my former job as an EdTech Facilitator. Now, in the classroom, the possibilities and potential for it in the classroom are exploding in my mind! Have students create their "focus" writing (a writing strategy that we are exploring right now in the curriculum) in digital form and have a voki read it. Each week, the writing could change so that the Voki would have updated text to read. For EL students, have them publish the writing they are working on using the voices of Julie, Kate, Steven, or Paul to model correct pronunciation. Better yet, have students record their own voice for their writing. I wasn't aware of the Voki Classroom opportunity (for $29.95 a year) that allows you to create student accounts, even without email, and create assignments right inside the Voki environment. I could teach them how to embed these on their blogs, and voila, one step closer to more creativity. In math, we're just beginning our adventure into multiplying, 5th grade style (multiplying whole numbers, fractions, decimals, etc). Most of my students have scored in the lower levels of the CST, which is our annual state assessment. Most don't have their times tables memorized and many don't understand the concept of multiplication. I had thought of having them take pictures of arrays around the school. What would be the best (and most effecient) way to publish them, however? Should students use Animoto or VoiceThread? There are so many choices! I haven't bought VoiceThread EDU, but maybe I will. I could have students publish their photos on a Google presentation and add the captions, but that sounds so traditional - and kind of boring. I'll work this one out and share what we did. I also revisited Sumo Paint this morning, having read about it on the Google Certified Teachers group (that group of teachers is amazing!). Sumo Paint is a powerful image editing site, online and free. What fascinated me this morning were the Kaliedescope and Triangle filters in Sumo Paint. How about students creating a design that could also be converted into multiplication equations? We could use Jing to capture and publish the creation. I'm thinking of something like this:
I hope to keep sharing the ideas that inspire me, but I'm not promising I'll be consistent. I'm too inundated with the day to day pull of trying to do my best.
