How Zombies Saved My School Year

My first week of school was pretty disappointing for me.  I watched my colleagues to exciting things like Goosechase.com and rewriting hip-hop songs about reading and creating a viral video.  The teachers I follow on Twitter were all overjoyed about the magic that is the beginning of the school year.  I had great ideas.  I had participated in hours of professional development on technology integration and Writer's Workshop.  I did my own research as well hoping to find some tips on implementing personalized learning and standard based grading.  I was educated, trained and prime for my own magic.

But after a few staff meetings, PLC meetings and a grade level meeting I realized that my first week was not going to magical.  It was going to be boring and frustrating.  My school had to schedule STAR testing early in the year to free up computer labs and Chromebooks for real instruction and that seemed like a noble idea at the time.  The problem came when we realized that someone (don't you love it when they say "someone" and you know that means you) will have to teach the students how to change their passwords.  "Hey, while you're at it - have them sign up for all of our Google Classroom accounts - and their Remind accounts now that I think of it".   I wanted to be the good sport and honestly I had forgotten the pain of teaching 30 students Chromebook procedures.  My students from last year came so far that I could just throw out an app and they'd figure it out and I know these kids will grow the same way - maybe faster because I've grown.  Yet, on those first few days I found myself grumpy, cranky and impatient.  This was not the magical first week I wanted - or that 6th grades venturing to middle school the first time deserved.

So,  I had to get quiet and reevaluate.  The good news was that the students were flying around the chromebook like experts by Friday - the bad news is they hadn't really learned much else.  I pulled up my Social Studies lesson plans and began to review them - ugh - The 5 Themes of Geography Loupe Collage - BORING! So I  started Googling for ideas and playing around with apps.  I stumbled across a lesson where students had to determine the survivability of a given location in the event of a zombie apocolypse using the 5 themes of Geography.  The teacher had provided the handout for free on Google and I totally ripped it off, added to it and edited for my purposes and planned on implemented it the next week.  *I jokingly say, I've never had an original thought in my life - I beg, borrow and steal most ideas I use in my classroom*  I always give credit when I can - if this is your lesson please let me know so I can give you credit and thank you for sharing!*

 The kids were stoked, they were engaged, they collaborated and they presented.  *sigh - I found my happy place once again and it was all thanks to zombies!

And since I ripped the whole thing off- here's my version!  Zombie Geography Lesson 

A Rubric for Assessing 21st Century Life Skills

There is a lot of talk about ensuring students receive instruction based on 21st Century Skills.  The 21st Century Skills are a collection of skills that educators and business leaders have determined students need to be successful in the 21st century. Below is an illustration from P21 - the coalition of educators and business leader who developed the framework.

P21 

Teachers have long been aware of their  responsiblity for the core subjects (green), the technology skills (purple) and we're beginning to do better on the Innovation skills (orange).

The part that is difficult to teach, measure and assess are the life skills (red).  The life skills that are outlined here are flexibility, self-directedness, time management and working well with others.  These are easy for teachers to observe but very difficult to assess and help students develop strong 21st Century Life Skills.  As a teacher, I know their weaknesses in flexibility and self-directedness directly impacts their learning but I have struggled with the best way to make students aware. Telling them over and over again has not worked for 20 years so this year - the 21st year - I'm trying something different.

I've designed a rubric to assess students' 21st Century life skills. The assessment will take place twice a quarter in a sit down conference with me - much like a reading or writing conference that students are used to doing anyway.  My hope is to be very good at documenting strengths and deficiencies in Power School, Class Dojo and in their conference notebooks on Evernote.  My goal is to use the documentation to drive a discussion with each student regarding their strengths and areas of growth to make them aware of how these untangible foggy skills really do impact their learning.

 I've included the rubric below and would welcome any comments or feedback on the instrument or the approach!

21st Century Life Skill	4	3	2	1
Accept direction and constructive feedback effectively.	Always listens and follows direction. Responds politely to redirection. Seeks feedback on how to improve work.	Listens and follows directions most of the time. Takes redirection without argument. Accepts feedback and uses it to improve.	Sometimes argues with teacher when being redirecteds. Sometimes follows instruction. Sometimes accepts feedback for improvement.	Repeatedly argues when redirected. Rarely seeks feedback on how to improve grades.
Manage time and meet deadline	Always meets deadlines and turns in assignments on time	Meets most deadlines.	Regularly misses deadlines.	Misses most deadlines.
Setting and Working towards goals	Works with teacher to set and meet goals. Seeks out guidance when falling behind.	Meets goals set for them and accepts offered help when teacher notices student is behind.	Misses goals that have been set by student or teacher.	Misses most goals and does not seek help in reaching them.
Be a self directed learner	Always stays on task. Seeks out ways to expand on what they've learned. Makes connections from topics in class to the world around them.	Stays on task most of time. Makes connections when presented to them. Ask thoughtful questions regarding the content.	If off task sometimes. Completes minimum assignment with no connections made or questions asked.	Repeatedly off task and completes little work independently.
Interact effectively with others	Always gets along well with classmates. Solves problems effectively and quickly. Shows tolerance for others' ideas and points of view.	Gets along with others most of the time. Accepts teacher's or counselor's advice on solving problems. Tries to understand other's points of view.	Sometimes has difficulty working with others and does not work with classmates or teacher to solve the issue effectively.	Does not work well in cooperative groups.
Be productive	Always produces high quality work.	Produces high quality work most of time.	Sometimes produces high quality work.	Rarely produces high quality work.
Leadership and responsibility	Always stands up for what is right. Takes responsibility for his/her actions.	Takes responsibility most of the time and usually stands up for what is right.	Sometimes accepts responsibility for his/her actions.	Rarely accepts responsibilty for his/her actions and often blames others for his/her mistakes.

Top 10 from P19

10.  Food, Fabulous Food!  We were fed well and often!  Thanks ITF's!

9.  Badges - I love using badges with kids and enjoyed earning the displaying my badges!

8. Google Moments - Couldn't get enough of these!  My fav was Moveit!  Random wallsits and wiggling the right side of my body never gets old!

 

7. WonderBlogs!  - great way to record thinking... and it's fun to say!

6. Lipsyncing! Barenaked Ladies style...well sorta! 

5.  Learning....it's Personal. Seriously, this is the "thing" I'm most interested in implementing in my room.  Haven't found many tools with adaptive content already built in for ELA but I'm sure it's coming!  #tappingfoot

4.  If This/Then That makes me more effecient...and I totally need that.  Social networking spreads us thin but Twitter is so valuable in my learning as a teacher that I can't afford to miss some important Tweets. Thanks ITF's!  

3.  Lots of time to play!...ahem work!  Seriously, it's so stressful learning new things and not having time to use them!  Thanks ITF's. 

2.  Minecraft makes me dizzy but I don't wanna stop!  

1.  NEW FRIENDS!  The best part of Pinnacle and being a teacher in Gaston County Schools are the wonderful people we get to work with.  Thanks all!  

3....2....1...Go!

Pinnacle 19 - Year 2 - Day 1

3 things I found out.

1.  Lots of new Chromebooks for GCS Schools!  

2.  There's a model called the 4C's - Critical Thinking, Creativity, Collaboration and Communication

3. Personlized intstruction is hard and we have to collaborate! 

2 Interesting things

1. Super Fizz-bomb formulas can help me personalize instruction.

2.  Green Screens can be made out of Pizza boxes with puppets as the players! 

1 Question

What will personalized learning look like in my classroom? 

A digital worksheet is still a worksheet...unless....

I learned long ago that worksheets don't work.  Circling the noun and underlining the verb 50 times is redundant, ineffective and superfluous....did I say redundant?  However, not all worksheets are created equal. I have a few favorites that make kids think, synthesize and make some serious connections. I still want to use them...without the guilt.

For example, each Christmas season my students and I read O'Henry's classic short story, "The Gift of the Magi".  The vocabulary is challenging, the sentence structure is complex and it has a rich theme perfect for this time of year.  A couple of the activities (substitute worksheet here) I do with the story require students to identify the different types of figurative langauge and the theme.

They really are great activities...really! However, this year I wanted to "tech up" my Christmas lesson but I really still wanted to do those *whisper* worksheets.
I'm very unorganized when it comes to keeping up with paper so I couldn't find my laminated copies of the short story and worksheets - no worries - I had the digital copy and Google Classroom!  So I posted the PDF of the story and the figurative language questions on Google Classroom with an audio version of the story for anyone absent the day I taught the story.

Here's the doc I posted and they turned in on Google Classroom. I know it's a worksheet but I saved 240 copies by not copying the story and the worksheets. They didn't' lose them, I didn't have to store them and my absent kids have access to them.

Now, that's all very well...and boring. I know - it's not flashy - but honestly day to day school is reading and answering questions.  We do it a lot. By using Google Classroom I solved a lot of problems - my own and my students'.

The second activity asks students to determine the theme of the story and two pieces of text evidence to support the theme... I know- very "Common Core". I Googlefied this worksheet as well and then had students use graphic design app Canva.com to desing a Christmas card from the main characters in the story with the theme inside.  It was fun and creative - AND it was based on a worksheet.

Here's one of their Christmas cards - from the Dillinghams to you ...with love.

So, yes... a digital worksheet is still a worksheet unless you make it meaningful.

Using Do Ink's Green Screen App to teach kids to summarize.

...

We just finished our first round of green screen vidoes and boy, did we have a blast.  I learned a lot - some things went well and some things can be improved upon but I will definitely do this project again. Here's an outline of how I did the lesson - learn from my mistakes!  

1. I provided articles for students to read about different aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization.  I teach two levels of classes.  I placed all the articles in a Goole Drive folder and shared it on Google Classroom.  This was great because I didn't make any copies and students could access them from any where.  The issue came with my lower level students.  They had problems dicerning which article went with their assigned aspect of civilization.  It was a good thinking process for them because they had to skim the article to evaluate if it was an article useful to their topic.  It did slow them down and cause a bit of frustration.  I don't know that I would do it differently next time - but having done it before makes anticipating their struggles easier.  

2.  I taught students to summarize using a rule-based summary frame.  Summarizing is difficult and requires higher order thinking skills to evaluate which information should be kept and which should be left out.  Here' the summary frame I used: 

Topic- Restriction-Illustration
What is the general statement or topic?
What information narrows or specializes the topic?
What examples illustrate the topic?

Students had to identify the topic of the article and what was unique or special about that topic and then find examples of in the article that demonstrate the characteristics of the topic.  Some students read articles about Ancient Egyptian's belief in the afterlife while some wrote sumamries about the priests role in the social pyramid.  This process when well but several times I called their summaries scripts and it really threw them for a loop. Next time I would just work on the summaries and then have them change the tone to a script. 

3.  I had no idea how to use the app but our student media assistants did and they came to my class and taught two students how to do use the app.  Those two students recorded all the videos for each group and taught them to drop them into Imovie and submit the video on Google Classroom.  Then those two students taught two students in my other class and the process continued.

4. While videos were being recorded I worked with students to make their cue cards, rehearse and spruce up their performances.  They were told from the beginning that their videos would be published online and they only had one take.  This kept them working hard and prevented them from getting silly - it also made the process go a lot faster.  

5. It took my AIG students 3 days and my Inclusion students 4 and a tiny bit of a 5th day.  I'm sure it'll be even faster next time.  

Here's one of our videos: 

My First Attempt at integrating Minecraft.

Lesson objective:  Students can describe the ancient civilization of Mesopotamia and its advances that enabled them to flourish.

Amazing, huh?!  My media specialist approached me about this lesson and I jumped right on it!  The experience was incredible.  I literally know nothing about video games and especially Minecraft.  The media specialist and I were truly out of our element but the students took over and blew us away. It was quite scary at first because it looked like students were just wandering around the game world setting fire to stuff and knocking things down.  I tried to question them about what they were planning but their answers sounded like Greek to me!  They were collaborating, praising each other, and fluently using the terminology from the content that I needed them to know!  It was the PERFECT LESSON - and I had nothing to do with it.  It was all student driven and student centered - all I did was put the tool in their hands.