PVC Instruments

What should learning look like in the 21st Century? I have endeavored to answer this question this school year by turning my classroom into a laboratory to test the ideas that I have read about and listened to over the past year. Build Your Own Instrument: Blue Man Group Style, a culminating project for a unit on sound, was my latest attempt to define my concept of learning in the 21st Century.

This project required my students to create an instrument out of PVC pipes, the same sort of pipes that you'll find in your house's plumbing. I was inspired by the Blue Man Group, a "rock group" that most of my kids are familiar with and a few have seen live. This trio can make pretty amazing music from instruments constructed with PVC. I knew that once my students had seen them perform (check out this video from YouTube), they would be eager to build their own instruments. And just as I thought, my students tackled the project with a gusto from the design stage through construction.

So what how do I define 21st Century learning? Here are the competencies that I feel the project included/developed:

• Collaboration - My students worked cooperatively in groups of 3 - 5 on this project.
• Creativity/Innovation - Sir Ken Robinson has defined creativity as "the process of having original ideas that have value." I'm not sure of the value of these instruments yet, but it was obvious from the multitude of different designs that each one was truly original.
  
• Problem-Solving/Critical Thinking - It was common for a group to put their finished design together, only to find out that their design was flawed. One group found that they need would need more than screws and pipe strap to hold their instrument together and had to find a new way to do it. Students tinkered with their designs throughout the construction phase.
  
• Right-Brain Competencies (see Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind):
• Play - The instruments that the BMG play are of the percussion variety. I knew that this type of instrument would appeal to my kids; what kid doesn't like to bang on things. Aren't we always telling our boys to stop using their pencils as drums? The project was meant to act as an assessment, but I purposely planned an activity that would make it an enjoyable one.
• Design - No need to elaborate.
  
• Symphony - Students created instruments that had a minimum of three notes. They accomplished this by using either a slide or changing the length of different pipes (see photo above). This required them to synthesize what they had learned about sound, particularly frequency and pitch.

So where is the technology? It permeates the project, but I can't say that what I or my students did with it was real innovative. Here's a list of the technology that was used:

• Google Video - To get the video of the BMG to spark interest.
• Think.com - I linked to Home Depot and another site so that students could create their budgets.
  
• Digital Cameras - each group took photos of their instruments throughout the construction phase.
  
• Microsoft Word - Students typed up the project summaries using this. They also inserted photos into their documents.
  
• Wireless Laptop Lab - Students completed the work on Apple computers.

The project has me thinking though--is this really learning for the 21st Century? Before 21st Century skills were invented, I (and many other teachers) had my students creating products in groups using technology. Don't most teachers make an effort to develop these abilities in their students through their teaching?


Technorati Tags: Blue Man Group, education, teachers

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Bye Bye Blogs, Hello Think.com

I made a decision this school year that I thought I would never make: the decision to give up using blogs in my classroom. 21Publish, a provider I had used for two years, simply does not have enough control over the ads that show up on their free blogs. So when the ad "Find your perfect lover" started showing up on my fifth grade student blogs from last year, I decided to move on. It was really not a difficult decision though as I had already tested a product with the same capabilities, Think.com. Think allows my students to post text, photos, video, and even interactive stuff like polls and debates on their sites. Although there is no comment feature, students can still give and receive feedback through "stickies," which are posted at the bottom of their webpages.

Here are a couple projects that I've either completed or I am currently working on for Think:

A Science Fair for the 21st Century

When you think of the traditional science fair, what comes to mind? A gymnasium or an auditorium full of students standing in front of three panel backboards?
This past spring my fifth grade students completed science fair projects in an altogether different way. The overall purpose did not change--students were still learning about the scientific method by independently developing and conducting a scientific investigation and communicating the results. The method of communicating and presenting the investigation changed: instead of using a three-panel backboard, students presented their work on their own personal Web sites. I called this project the Online Science Fair.

Stick or Switch Project

Think.com has a very nice projects feature. It allows teachers to set up one or more project sites and designate members who can post material to the project pages. This fall my students will be doing what has become an annual project for my classes, using experimental probability to determine the best strategy for the Let's Make a Deal game--stick or switch? On Think I created a project site with a summary page; a directions page--complete with a poll that asks students what they think the best strategy is before they play--with links to the website where the can play the game; and a final page where I will post three graphs of their data. On this page students will vote for the graph that they think best represents the data. They will be able to see the votes of the other students and read their reasoning.

With so many possibilities publishing their work on Think, I can see my students working on projects that aren't even required and will not even be graded! They are fired up about this technology and so am I...


Technorati Tags: Think.com, education, blogs

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Paper Airplanes, Online Presentations

Paper Airplane Lesson Plan

In my effort to create an online archive of lesson plans that stresses quality over quantity, I've added another of my more successful science lessons to my website. It's about paper airplanes and the scientific method. Here's a brief overview of the lesson:

Students work with a partner to create two paper airplanes, each with a different design. They then fly the paper airplanes a set number of times and observe how far each goes. The lesson acts as a perfect introduction to the scientific method. Through it, students learn how to:

• Ask scientific questions
• Formulate hypotheses
• Clearly write procedures
• Collect data
• Draw conclusions
• Identify variables

The lesson has three stages: an observation period, a whole class experiment, and student experiments. An optional fourth stage would be a presentation of results. It also offers many opportunities for the incorporation of technology. Tech tips appear throughout the lesson.

Click here to download and view the lesson.

Online Presentations - Which site is best?

As a teacher who likes to hit the presentation circuit, I've been trying out some online slideshow software. Last February, I embedded a flickr slideshow in a post and liked it quite well. But embedding flickr slideshows isn't always the best way to share your slides. Below are my thoughts on some of the sites that allow users to share their presentations.

• About a month ago Tim Lauer posted about SlideShare, a site where you can upload a preexisting PowerPoint or OpenOffice slideshow. This is pretty handy since it means you no longer have to save your shows as a web page and then upload them to a server. Of course, the site is a also about social networking as users can tag presentations and comment on them as well. Here's SlideShare's major limitation: there's no way to publish a notes page. My slides are simple--they mostly contain a photo, a sentence, phrase, or sometimes just a single word. Bullet points are scarce in my presentations. Therefore, it's hard to get much information from them if I can't publish a notes page.

• Another site that I have tried is Thumbstacks. This site allows users to actually create, edit, and share the slideshow online. It's full of great features, unless you're into animations and transitions, it doesn't support those yet. But, once again, it doesn't have a notes page.

• Embedding a flickr slideshow works best if you have notes about each slide that you'd like to share with others. However, the slides come from photos in your archive and I can't imagine trying to turn my PowerPoint slides into images and uploading them to my flickr account.

The verdict: I like using PowerPoint to create my presentations, so Thumbstacks is out. I think for now my choice is SlideShare. If the slides are good enough and contain links to relevant websites, they can be powerful enough on their own to get your message across.



Technorati Tags: Thumbstacks | SlideShare | teachers


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Lesson Plan: Guess My Country

Ohio Content Standards

• Social Studies - Geography -
  
• Use coordinates of latitude and longitude to locate points on a world map.
• Use cardinal and intermediate directions to describe the relative location of places.
  
• Place countries and cities on the continents on which they are located.
  

Materials & Technology

• Planiglobe Online Map Creator
  
• World Atlas
• Student blogs

Background

This lesson makes use of the comment link to connect students and acquire data about their learning. Each student uses an atlas to find a country somewhere in the world. Then, using geography skills, they create clues for other students to use to find their mystery country. After the other students have figured out all the clues, they then place their answers as comments on the student's weblog.

Procedure

1. Students should first complete a Mystery Country Challenge (scroll down to find example) that you have created yourself.
   
2. After students have figured out what the mystery country is, have them read over the directions for the assignment.
   
3. Next, have the students click on the link for Planiglobe. Using this site, have students find their countries. Planiglobe allows users to dim the country's name so that only the borders and cities show. Once they have done this, have students save a printer friendly version of the image and upload it to their blogs.
   
4. Using a world atlas, have students create six clues based on the requirements in the directions.
   
5. Have students insert the country's image into a blog post and then type the clues under the image.
   
6. After posting, each student then attempts to find the other students' countries and place their answers as comments.

Evaluation

• Check each students clues for accuracy.
  
• Clues one & two - relative locations written correctly - 2 pts
• Clues three & four - landforms correctly identified; rel. loc. correct - 1 pt
• Clue five - intermediate direction correct - 1 pt
• Clue six - latitude and longitude written correctly - 1 pt
• Total - 6 pts
  

Student Examples

• Adam
• Molly
  

Lesson Plan for Podcasts: The Week in Review

Outcomes

After completing this project, students will be able to:

• Analyze and select events from the past week
• Write and edit a short summary of an online news article for a classroom podcast
• Use a news aggregator

Materials & Technology

• Audacity
• Bloglines
• A weblog or web host to host the podcast
  

Preparation & Technical Skills

Before beginning this project, teachers should open a classroom Bloglines account. This assignment should be done by small groups that rotate throughout the entire year. At the beginning of each week, each member of the group is assigned one of four entries to write and read for the podcast:

• Word of the week - Student chooses a word from the Dictionary.com Word of the Day subscription, reads the definition, and uses it in a sentence.
  
• Quote of the week - Student chooses a quote from the BrainyQuote.com's Quote of the Day.
  
• Sports story of the week - Just for fun. One student gets to do a story on a sports story from ESPN.com.
  
• News story of the week - Student chooses a story from several feeds: USA Today.com, Google News, Yahoo News, and local news from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

At the end of the week, students summaries are recorded using Audacity. Each summary is kept to a maximum of 20 - 30 seconds so that the when exported as an mp3 file, the entire podcast is smaller than 2 mb. After the mp3 is created, the file is then uploaded the class blog.

Evaluation Suggestions

At this point the podcast is still just an experiment. I have plans to change the podcast's format around a little bit. Eventually, the Week in Review will actually be a review of the content we have covered during the previous week in class. I like the idea of having "corners" similar to the ones heard on the Room 208 Podcast. When we reach this stage, I plan to assess how well the students summarize what we have learned throughout the week.

Student Examples

Here is the first ever Room 201 Podcast.

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Lesson Plan: Landforms

Ohio Content Standards

Grade 6

• Geography - Benchmark A: Identify on a map the location of major physical and human features of each continent.

Materials & Technology

• Atlases or dictionaries
• Google Images or another photo search engine
  
• Handout with names of landforms
  
• Weblogs

Background

This is a short and simple lesson that is great for introducing students to blogging. In this activity students are given the task of combining the definitions of two landforms and with a photo of each in two blog entries. Each student then presents their entries to the class (using an LCD projector); during the presentation students copy the definition and get a nice visual of the landform through the photos.

Preparation & Technical Skills

1. Each student should have their own blog. (I recommend 21Publish for blogging services)
   
2. Pass out a list of landforms with or without definitions. Assign each student two to three landforms to define and illustrate for the class.
   
3. If students are not familiar with Google Images, teach a mini-lesson on how to search for and choose a photo of their landforms.
4. Students should know how to download images from the Internet. If not, teach a mini-lesson on saving images from the Internet to the desktop.
5. Finally, students should also be able to upload the photo to their blogs.
   

Evaluation

I used this lesson to introduce my students to the world of blogging. Therefore, I did not assess technical skills or even the entries. I did however require every student to write down the definitions of each landform during the presentations. After giving them a few days to study, I gave a quiz on the definitions of each landform and also required students to be able to identify them on a map.

Lesson Plan: Literary Responses with Blogs

Ohio Content Standards

Grade 6

• Writing - Writing Process - Write responses to literature that extend beyond the summary and support judgments through references to the text.
• Reading - Reading Process - Apply self-monitoring strategies to clarify confusion about text and to monitor comprehension.
• Reading - Reading Process - Use criteria to choose independent reading materials (e.g., personal interest, knowledge of authors and genres or recommendations from others).
  

Materials & Technology

• Independent Reading Book for Students
• Printouts of Writing Prompts and Rubric
  
• Blogs

Background
In addition to the novels we read in my 6th grade language arts class, each student is required to read two books independently each quarter. Along with the reading, I have students respond to prompts in their blogs that require them to make references to their books. Each entry is graded according to a rubric that is introduced to the kids before they begin writing.

Preparation

1. Teach a lesson on how to choose a book for independent reading that is based on the reading process content standard above.
2. After students have selected a book and started reading, go over the writing prompts with them, being sure to clearly discuss your expectations. I only require students to write a paragraph in these entries.
3. Make sure students know what you mean when you say "examples from the novel." I'm not interested in page numbers or actual quotes; I just want to students to know that their paragraphs are incomplete until they have referenced the book in some way.

Student Examples

• I got confused...
• At first I thought...but...
• I started to think...
• See a whole set of entries

Evaluation

I have yet to give a grade for these entries. As you can see when you read them, they don't all follow the rubric. Writing in blogs is new for my kids and I haven't had the time to give as much feedback as I would like. My goal for the blogs is to begin giving feedback with each entry so that I can later evaluate them as I would a portfolio--one grade for a series of entries, instead of a grade for each entry.

Lesson Plans for Web 2.0

I figure there are enough ed tech blogs out there posting about the wonders of Web 2.0. By the time I get a chance to write about the newest thing, it's already been written about on 1, 207 other blogs. There don't seem to be many blogs out there though that feature actual lesson plans with examples of student work.

With my job change, I've also changed subjects. I mean, I added a few. I now teach everything--science, social studies, math, and language arts. Because I am no longer focused on just math, I am now open to explore new uses for the Web 2.0 tools--particularly blogs and podcasts. Therefore, the emphasis of this blog must now change. I'd like to start posting the lesson plans that I have used that require the use of blogs, digital images, podcast, and more.

Henceforth, this blog shall no longer be known as The Future of Math, but as misterteacher.com and will be a resource for teachers looking for lesson plans, classroom applications, and tips for teaching using the read/write web.