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My First Guest Blog Post!

2010
07.22

Jason T. Bedell's Blog

Jason T. Bedell's Blog

I just finished posting my first guest blog post on Jason T. Bedell’s blog! Jason was asking for guest posts on his blog about grading and assessment so I wrote a post titled, “Why Grade to Assess?” It was great to be able to reflect some more on the changes I’ve made to my grading and assessment practices. I’m excited and looking forward to the fall to continue improving how I give feedback to my students so that it can be more helpful than a letter grade or mark or check or number!

Thanks Jason!

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Goals for my Students

2010
07.21

Stream table exploring to learn about how streams flow and landforms form.

Stream table exploring to learn about how streams flow and landforms form.

After July 20th’s #edchat on the Goal of Education (see archive here) I got to thinking about my goals for the children I help educate. It helped me, with my thinking, to read “Backwards Design and Integrating New Technology” because I integrate technology whenever I can. I need to continually ask myself if what I do with students is aligned with my goals and in line with what they need for their education. A lot of great ideas were brought up during the hour long #edchat but I remained fixated on three words that I took away: Create, Connect and Collaborate. Those three, little words pretty much summarize a lot of what I have my students do. I kept bringing up the idea that as teachers we should help our students find their passions. By encouraging our students to be critical thinkers and to be independent learners and to explore and keep their curiosity and joy of learning we can facilitate discovering of passions. This could take some kids until high school or beyond while some kids know what they want from a very young age. Our job is to NOT stifle our kids love of learning and discovering. We should foster their passions even if their passions change. That’s what it means to be a child.

I have been teaching Science for a while now. I have my students learn by reading, researching and doing labs. Hands on, minds on learning makes sense. My students also discuss and work in small groups to complete projects that can take weeks to complete. Why? In learning a Science concept I’d much rather spend more time on one or two concepts than rush through many concepts. Yeah, a mile deep and inch wide is my modus operandi. Besides, by using multiple methods, labs, reading, listening, observing, creating, and collaborating students stand a chance of getting it (whatever “it” is). I don’t know which method will work with which student. I had 150 students last year! But I stand a chance to helping more of my students learn if we spend time on concepts and learn those concepts in different ways.

With technology my students get to create, connect and collaborate. That doesn’t mean we use technology all the time. We don’t need to. Now I am guilty of trying anything new. If it works I will keep it, if it doesn’t work I drop it. How do I know if it works? I ask my students. If they like something and tell me it helps them learn, I’ll do it again. That happened last year when I set up a Moodle chat to have class discussions. I had a lot of students participate where before I’d be leading a whole class discussion interacting with one student at a time. I will do more of that and next year I will incorporate twitter because I will have enough machines for 1:1 access.

Here are some examples of what students can create with technology. By blogging or sharing their work via a blog or a wiki students connect with other students around the world. So why do I have my students use technology? To create, connect and collaborate so they will think further and hopefully deeply and meaningfully about our topics so they can form their own understandings. I’d much rather have my students creating, connecting and collaborating than sitting listening to me.

Stream table exploration to see how to save homes.

Stream table exploration to see how to save homes.

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Presentation Skills – Contamination!

2010
07.12

From a few of the North Cascades and Olympic Science Partnership (NCOSP) Learning Community Forums on the “Four Hats of Leadership” based on The Adaptive School: A Sourcebook for Developing Collaborative Groups by Garmston and Wellman we learned about the following:

•Facilitating (directs processes, maintains focus, supports group dialogue, planning, decision-making, or problem-solving)
•Presenting (extend and enrich knowledge and skills, “stance” varies – Expert, Colleague, Friend)
•Coaching (help others realize their own goals, develop expertise in others, move toward independence and self-directed learning)
•Consulting (use of specialized knowledge to address nontrivial problems, best applied where trust and commonly goals exist, translating knowledge from one situation to a new context)

Something has stuck with me from the forum on Presentation that has been driving me crazy. Driving me crazy partly because it’s difficult for a classroom to do and partly because being aware of it makes me want to fix it! The dreaded concept is that of contamination. Some tips and tricks we were taught I try to remember for those few times a year that I present to staff and colleagues. One of the most important things I took away was to make whatever topic you are discussing, especially controversial topics, the center of attention so you aren’t linked with any negative emotions toward the topic. Using an easel or whiteboard a presenter will continually make sure to put the topic clearly on display and point to it if tempers rise. Keep the hot tempers on the easel or the whiteboard. It was recommended that we use two easels because once one easel has been “contaminated” by negative emotions it makes it more difficult to get past those emotions on that easel. With a whiteboard I guess you can move to the other end or hopefully another whiteboard.

The idea of contamination was discussed as it applies to a classroom and the classroom teacher as presenter. If you teach from a spot in your classroom you should not do other things from that spot. For example, say you are teaching from your typical spot and a kid acts up. By disciplining the child from your teaching spot you contaminate that spot. For better or for worse every student in your classroom feels some disciplining type of emotion when you disciplined that one child and emotional memory is strong on remembering place as well as feeling. So when you try to teach from your usual spot again your students may subconsciously feel negatively due to the disciplining you did from there. Same goes for conversation. If you start engaging a student or a small group from your whole group spot you contaminate it because it sends a mixed signal to the whole class. Is that the spot I need to be listening or if he’s in that spot speaking is that something I can ignore or begin daydreaming?

I used a classroom layout of my room and put labels on the different spots I use and what I typically use them for in an attempt to keep each spot only for specific actions. In the image below (click on it to view it full size) I try to keep my giving directions spots, separate from my giving instruction spots, and my correcting or disciplining spots, and my reinforcing (usually done to small teams) and conversation spots. Maybe I got too convoluted. My biggest fail is forgetting to move away from my giving directions for instructing spots to discipline. It’s just not always convenient to move, ask a kid to fill out a behavior form, then step back into the teaching spot and continue. Ugh. What do you do? Am I obsessing when I shouldn’t be?

Classroom Layout with Presentation Spots Labeled

Classroom Layout with Presentation Spots Labeled

I tried to look up more information on contamination. It was not easy as there are too many other things that can get contaminated but I did find this: Are you guilty of contamination? From Communication Breakdown. It was exactly what I remembered from the forums. It’s always going to be on the back of my head. I wonder if I’ll ever get good at keeping my spots from getting contaminated?

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Assessment for Learning (AfL)

2010
07.10

Assessment is the latest educational buzz topic. As is customary in a profession in order to become proficient at something we must take it out of the realm of hit or miss and become mindful of what we do so that we can put into effect what needs to be done when it needs to be done. We are all familiar with summative assessment because we all grew up with end of unit tests. Take a test at the end of learning something to show you’ve learned it, or not, and that’s that. Along the way educators used a variety of techniques to make sure their students were learning the material and made adjustments as needed to ensure a high number showed mastery on the final exam. At least that’s what should have been happening. Hence the awakening (reawakening?) of formative assessment. Now there are books, sites and resources to help us do what we’ve been doing informally all along. Questioning students and taking polls with a raise of hands are techniques we’ve all used in our classes but read the book, Science Formative Assessment: 75 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning by Page Keeley, for example, and you can find many more great techniques to choose from. And what’s better we can use formative assessment techniques deliberately. That’s what makes us professional educators, doing something because it helps our students learn.

In case you weren’t sure what formative assessment is all about there is the phrase Assessment for Learning, or AfL, as opposed to Assessment of Learning (AoL?), which is summative assessment. Ah but there is a difference between formative assessment and AfL. AfL is more frequent formative assessment. Formative assessment can be long cycle, between units, medium cycle, within a unit, or short cycle, daily. AfL is short cycle, day to day or minute to minute assessing of students. It’s like I told my students when I went gradeless, “I’m not going to grade you anymore but I’m still going to assess you regularly.” AfL is most effective when done on a regular basis and often. My school has a strong middle and high school Math and Science Professional Learning Community team (PLC). We’ve had the opportunity to work together for years now due to our work with our region’s Olympic Math and Science Partnership (OMSP). OMSP provides our district with the funds necessary to get subs so that our PLC can meet and work on improving Math and Science 6-12! Aside from ensuring that we have time to meet throughout the school year OMSP also hosts leadership training and content and pedagogical PD. This past school year’s theme was AfL so the materials I’ll be sharing in this blog come, with permission, from OMSP (Click on the different Assessment for Learning links for all the resources we got). Here is what OMSP gave us as a reason for undergoing the process of AfL: Practice in a classroom is formative to the extent that evidence about student achievement is elicited, interpreted, and used by teachers, learners, or their peers, to make decisions about the next steps in instruction that are likely to be better, or better founded, than the decisions they would have taken in the absence of the evidence that was elicited. ~Black and Wiliam (2009)

AfL Strategies Poster

AfL Strategies Poster

AfL includes the following five strategies pictured here. Formative Assessment Classroom Techniques (FACT’s, gotta love the acronyms, huh?) are used to support these five strategies and the 75 FACT’s in Science Formative Assessment: 75 Practical Strategies for Linking Assessment, Instruction, and Learning are good for any subject, not just Science.

Let’s look a little more closely at each strategy.

1. Sharing Learning Expectations

2. Questioning

3. Feedback

4. Self-Assessment and 5. Peer Assessment

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iPads in Science

2010
06.30

I am very fortunate. Of the 19 years I’ve been teaching I’ve gotten at least one grant for 12 of those years; 10 of them have been the last 10 consecutive years. Four years ago I received a couple of Best Buy grants which allowed me to replace the ten iMacs in my classroom for ten newer iMacs. Seven years of Learn & Serve America grants have provided my students with a lot of equipment including two Macbook pros and a Dell Desktop. An HP Technology for Teaching grant got us an HP Tablet Laptop. With classes of 24 to 32 students over the years I’ve mainly had a ratio of 2:1 and 3:1 students to computer. Next year I’ll have a pretty cool opportunity.

I’ve just reapplied for my eighth year of Learn & Serve America grants for the 2010-11 school year and I put in my budget a request for 12 iPads. Hearing of my plans my district’s Special Ed and LAP/Title director approached me about using Solo 6 with all the 6th graders, since I teach Science to all of them, and I agreed. I was shocked and elated to find that she offered me money to purchase a few more computers so that more of the 6th graders would have access to the software. So I ordered five Dell Inspiron Mini 10 netbooks!

So if my class sizes for next year stay 30 or fewer, which they look to be right now, I will have a ragtag 1:1 student to computer, netbook, desktop, laptop, tablet, or iPad ratio! I’m excited because I think my students can do great things in their small groups of two or three when each member of the team has access to a type of computer! I’ll get to order the iPads in September. Well I was panicking thinking of how students will want to get their hands on them when they arrive around October yet I’ll want to take some time to prep them for my students. I know, the control freak in me. So I visited our district’s business manager and asked if I could somehow either order one iPad now with my grant funds or buy one myself and be reimbursed with grant funds so I can practice over the summer and get it all prepped. I should have known, we can’t order something now with next school year’s budget. Ugh. So I called Apple to see if we could write a purchase order for September and get the iPad now. Their customer service said, “no, we need to receive payment 30 days from the placing of the order.” Rats!

Our business manager told me to ask my principal to see if she’d order one for me. So I did. She first wanted to see if we had any money left over in this year’s budget. No such luck, of course! So she looked into next year’s tech budget and gave me the okay! Thank you, Whitney!! So I ordered it and put in for a reimbursement in September!! For the last few days I’ve been playing, I mean prepping, the iPad to use with my students in the Fall. My room will look something like this (click here).

iPad home screen.

iPad home screen. (Click on picture to see full size.)

Here’s my plan so far for my ragtag 1:1 Science classes. On the bottom dock of the main screen, next to the Safari, Mail and iPod links, I’ve placed a link to my 6th grade Moodle page, a link to my 8th grade Moodle page and a link to our classblogmeister blogs. Students can access my Moodle documents and links and resources as well as their blog accounts. With Cinch students can even create podcasts to load onto their blogs. Along with Cinch I also had to get Blue FiRe cause it’s great for recording. Sadly, they can’t create glogs or prezis on the iPads but that’s why I’m glad I have iMacs and PC’s for students to be able to do those as well. At least that’s what I thought until @NMHS_Principal reminded us that CloudBrowse allows you to view flash content on the iPhone and iPad. We’ll see if prezi and glogster will work. I’m planning to use twitter in class so I got Twitbird Pro. I love having class discussions where more than one student can “talk” at a time, especially the quiet, shy ones. Go backchanneling! I tried using Moodle chat this past year with students in their small teams and after a slight hiccup it became a huge success! For an RSS agregator I find Reeder to be fantastic. The Weather Channel Max (TWC Max+) for the iPad is awesome and kicks butt of the iPhone version. It’s going to be great.

I got my school a Google Apps account and with the Documents2 app students can access their Google Docs or share their work from Documents2 via FTP or via a web address. It’s a pretty nifty app. Photo Pad allows us to share pictures using Flickr so I’m excited about using that app too. I’m sure students will find Dragon Dictation useful, my 7 year old daughter loves it but she enjoys all the errors it makes :) . I also have a Science glossary, ScienceVL, and a regular Dictionary with Thesaurus (dictionary.com). Google Earth for the iPad, a calculator app, PCalc Lite, a timer app, iLab: Timer HD, and a unit Converter app, round out the main screen.

[Addendum: After trying out Tweetdeck for the iPad I'm not happy with it. It crashes constantly and I can't add a Facebook column and I couldn't even figure out how to delete a column. Maybe I'm missing something. So I've deleted Tweetdeck. I've also decided against Read It Later, it's great for me but I'm not sure students will need it. Same thing with the Delicious Bookmark app. So those three are gone. Add to the list Dropbox. I would need to buy another app because I can't use Documents2 with Dropbox so I've decided to keep Documents2 and delete Dropbox.]

iPad second screen.

iPad second screen. (Click on image to view full size.)

On the second screen I have some Science apps. One of my absolute favorites is The Elements app, which is the most incredible way I have seen to learn about elements in the periodic table. There are some fantastic periodic table websites out there but this app blows them away! The Star Walk and Solar Walk are also very cool and along with the moon phase app will be very enjoyable and helpful for students. The BrainPop app is pretty cool and I’m curious about the Bug Sim app (pictured below). I haven’t tried it yet, but it’s a simulation game (the only game I have on the iPad cause the learning apps I have are fun enough, right?) “for Darwinian Evolution, specifically through survival of the fittest.” [Okay, so I tried Bug Sim. Not visually stunning, the bugs are multicolored one or two pixel square boxes. Fainter, smaller circles represent food. You choose how many bugs to start with, how much food, and how food regenerates. You can even add up to two gardens of Eden with quickly regenerating food supply. Then you let it run and see what happens with a graph showing population growth and decline. It also shows births, deaths, and mutations. I think i will try it with my 8th grade Life Science classes.]

With Animation HD students can create animations to use on their blogs or wikis. Ezimba is a cool app for students to add effects to photographs. Another creative app. VideoScience has some great videos of science experiments and labs. So along with DNA Lite, Molecules, Insects HD, Animals HD, and HD Marine Life 2 I think students can do some fun learning (had to find stuff for my 8th grade Life Science students). MeAnderthal is just fun (too bad you can’t take pictures with the iPad, we really need that feature added). GoDocs is good for viewing Google Docs (viewing only as I discovered after buying it). Then iBooks, Kindle and Stanza round out this second screen. After reading iPad in Education I added the Photopad app to this screen for photo editing to go along with Ezimba.

iPad third screen.

iPad third screen. (Click on image to view full size.)

The third screen is as yet undeveloped. I have some apps here that I am using this summer but don’t plan to use with students. HistoryMaps is cool so I’ll keep it for my students who appreciate history like I do :) I added some more apps to fill up this screen after reading iPad in Education. I added Comic Touch Lite (the free version), Draw Free and Doodle Buddy to help students create what they need for their blogs or wikis. I also added 3D Brain, Brain Tutor and 3D Sun for some fun Science. And I gave in and added a game. The free version of Rush Hour.

So I can’t wait until October! :o Please let know if I’m missing anything or if there’s a cool iPad app I should try.

Bug simulation game.

BugSim game app. (Click on image to see full size.)

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Reflections of 2009-10

2010
06.30

This year I taught three 6th grade Science classes, which means I had all 90 of my middle school’s 6th graders, and two 7/8 mixed Earth Science classes. Being able to teach 7th and 8th grade Science is wonderful because that means that I get to have some of my former 6th grade students again! I really appreciate that because the relationships we build in 6th grade just get strengthened. It’s like we’re taking off from where we left off instead of having to start all over again! My middle school has an advisory program for a 1/2 hour daily made up of about 14 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students. Students are used to at least one place where each year only 1/3 of their group is new. I find that a great way to work with my students. When I get to teach 7th grade it’s especially nice because I will have some students for three years in a row! That has been a great experience for me. Next year I will be teaching three 6th grade Science classes, all the 6th graders again, and two 8th grade Life Science classes. I look forward to having some of this past year’s 7th graders back in my two Life Science classes next year!

The highlight of this past year was when I went gradeless in the third and last trimester. After participating in conversations with some great educators in my Professional Learning Network (PLN), reading some books from Alfie Kohn about not using grades as punishments and rewards and about giving students the education they deserve, viewing some talks from Dan Pink (great youtube video!) and Sir Ken Robinson on motivation and passion, and following up with a teacher from Alberta, Canada, Joe Bower (@joe_bower), and a teacher from Arizona, Paul Strauss (@SciTeach3), I made the preparations to go gradeless to encourage not just more learning but a love of learning from my students. I focused on the projects, labs and lessons students were to work on while using formative assessments to see if they were understanding the concepts. At the end of a given unit I would give students some essential questions based on the Science standard and concepts to see if they showed understanding. Then I reported this to students and families on paper and online using Easy Grade Pro. Below is an image of a sample progress report. I deliberately left out any marks, letters or numbers. In 5th grade my students received report cards with standards much like mine but instead of narrative feedback alone each standard was given a number. When I asked my 6th graders if they remembered the prior year’s report cards they all said yes and started to tell me what numbers they had received. I heard 3′s, 4′s, 2′s and 1′s but I didn’t hear what the numbers meant and when I asked what they received the numbers for not a single student could remember. That’s what the research shows that when students are given numbers, letters or marks that is what they focus on and remember. Plus grades are great for ranking students, which is something I don’t feel the need to do in middle school. Whether my middle school students receive A’s or F’s they still move on to the next grade so aside from rewarding and punishing them the letter grades really serve no purpose. The students who still wanted letter grades were interested in maintaining their high GPA’s, to know their rank.

Mr. G's sample progress report for standards based reporting.

Mr. G's sample progress report for standards based reporting.

I created an end of year survey using Google Forms and 122 of my 146 students filled out a survey. Of the 122 responses 92%, or 112, of the students responded that going gradeless in Science was a good experience for them. Of the ten who preferred or missed having grades most of them reported that they liked knowing they got an A or they would have liked to get an A. Of the 112 who enjoyed or appreciated not having to worry about grades here is a sampling of their responses:

it was more enjoyable

pretty good for a change I loved it.

i liked it because people cant brag if they got an a and people wont feel down because they got an f

i like the idea of no actual grades plus your grade doesnt matter because you dont know if you got an a, a b, or a c.

awesome there wasn’t as much streets.

better i didn’t worry so much and i learned a lot

Terrific. I got to learn how I wanted without the worry of not having an A or something.

it was th best thing ever becuase i always do worse in the last tri

It was amazing the amount of pressure off of my shoulders was greatly reduced, and it allowed me to worry more on my subjects that needed to be improved.

it was awesome with a A B C D F it really didnt explain your understanding of the subject unlike the new progress reports.

awsome it made me feel smart

good but i kept doing work

The above responses were typical responses. The majority of my students felt less stress and less pressure and focused on learning. I enjoyed the trimester and I was less stressed because I didn’t punish any student for doing poorly on an assignment or getting strange data on a lab (that’s actually fun to look into!). I also appreciated that the students who usually ask what they can do once they figure out they got the “A” could just continue working and learning. I want to encourage my students to work hard not just go for a grade. So based on my observations and the feedback I got from students and parents I got what I was hoping for so I’m going to continue using standards-based reporting next year. The good news is that next year’s 6th graders are used to this type of reporting because that is the way our elementary does reporting so it won’t be new for them. Some of my 8th graders will find a continuation of the last trimester while some will get to experience something new. This past year was a huge success and I’m looking forward to next year already!

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15 Things About the Human Body

2010
05.16

15 Things You Didn't Know About the Human Body
Via: Online Nursing Programs

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Dan Pink on Motivation

2010
05.15

Dan Pink has some great research to share on motivation. Dan is a great speaker and his talks verify what Alfie Kohn has been writing about for years. This youtube video is pretty fascinating to watch as this incredible artists draws what Dan Pink is talking about as Dan talks! Still what amazes the most is how research shows that offering rewards or incentives works only for predictable and easy tasks. Once the tasks become even slightly more complex offering rewards or incentives leads to the unimaginable – poorer performance! Don’t believe me? Watch the video.

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Standardized Tests

2010
05.15

Standardized Testing CartoonI was reading Larry Ferlazzo’s post on standardized testing and I thought I’d share it here. He asked his students to let him know their impressions of the test and I must say their feedback is very telling. We all know that one size fits all testing is not an effective way to measure what our students are learning just as we know that standardized tests do not show the incredible work our students are doing. No, standardized tests are at best a snapshot of what our students can recall of what they’ve learned at some point in their lives (I say lives because school isn’t the only place where we learn). Knowing what we know about standardized tests it’s a shame that our leaders rely so heavily on them to determine how our schools are doing and how much our students are learning. Testing hasn’t caught up with 21st Century Learning but we are using it to measure what our students are doing in their classes anyway. Here’s Mr. Ferlazzo’s post. I think his students did a great job of describing how well they believe state tests measure what they know and what they think would be a better measure.

Oh and we’re not alone in this. Read this Washington Post article about teachers in England who are outright refusing to administer their versions of state tests!

Mr. Gonzalez

Standardized Testing cartoon.

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Odssey 2010

2010
05.13

We are almost ready for our week-long field trip to gorgeous Lake Crescent for the 8th grade Olympic Odyssey! In case your child has lost or misplaced some of the most recent paperwork here is a link to a copy of the packing list: Odyssey2010FinalRemindLetter

And here is a link to the Final Reminder letter that was also sent home: odyssey2010_packing_list

I will be joining the 8th graders this year Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. If you have any questions please call our office at 732-4219.

Thank you.

Al Gonzalez

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