iWizard, GrandTrunk, and Thinking Smarter not Harder

First off, major props to Jeff Stanzler and Rory Hughes for setting this up in the first place. I truly appreciate instructors who truly try to think outside of the box when trying to educate their students. Conferences are a great way to do this, especially if students haven't necessarily gone before. While I have gone to quite a few and organized a a couple, it was interesting seeing people who hadn't before, navigate the MACUL conference, a different learning experience that I believe will serve them for years to come, I know it did for me.

Moving on to a few of the different session I attended, the first was titled iWizard 1:1 Student Initiatives. What I really appreciated about this session was that when I first walked in, I actually saw high school students presenting. This was great because I really wasn't expecting that at all being at this renown conference. It was a pleasant surprise and helped, I believe in presenting the product that they did. The students were essentially talking about an after school program that they had centered around technology and helping students become literate in the field. This ranged from teaching the students basics, having to do  with how to use a computer in school, with wifi, etc. all the way to possible aspect of coding. Students were mentored by older high school students who were mentored by just a few of the different teachers and staff at their school. The reason why this presentation was so appealing to me because save for a few of the adults who helped with logistics, this organization was ran predominately by high school students. I just found it extremely amazing that they were doing this work. Rory mentioned to me after when I saw him throughout the day, that most school's staff don't even have these skills. This statement got me excited due to the fact that students can really do unique things when given the platform to do so, often times things that are extensions to what adults can't do. It all depends I believe on the level of investment given to students, both inside and outside of the classroom.

Another session that I attended was Working Smarter, Not Harder. Derek Wheaton lead this session and while I appreciated the dance party we had at the beginning I felt as if many of the tips that he discussed weren't necessarily revolutionary. I was amazed, however, how so many other people within the audience were very intently writing everything that he was saying. I came to realize after that session that there needs to be a lot more support in place for teachers. Don't get me wrong, I definitely took some notes on a few different applications that I plan to use in the future, it just seemed as if a lot of people had never heard of some of the concepts before. Derek did a great job as a speaker in that he was very personable and seemed to have a lot of knowledge in his subject field of creating better functioning schools around staff professional development. One thing I really appreciated was that he greeted everyone at the door as we came into his session and even mentioned us UM interns within his presentation.

A great aspect that I enjoyed of this conference was being able to walk around with the many different MAC'ers in Detroit and eat at GrandTrunk and reflect on the day. This is somewhat hard to do being in placement full time now. I feel as if I never have enough time to pick everyone's brain about things. The only recommendations I have for next year would be for people to know about parking ahead of time (since a lot of ppl freaked out) and to have a formalized meal that the entire cohort does together to actually talk about the conference and just to chit chat.

Thanks again for the experience

Typing to the Rescue

The idea for my lesson plan actually came from the previous semester and the final assignment that students had to turn in. Students were to submit a final paper that unfortunately took them about 2 weeks of class time to actually complete. The reason that I believe it took this long was because students were asked to type their final paper and unfortunately most students really weren't proficient with typing on a keyboard. Furthermore, students have a lot of issues losing copies of their papers and not remembering their passwords to their email addresses. As a result of this I decided that we really needed to go over some of these basic skills as they would become extremely crucial to students within the future. This is where the idea for the assignment was generated.

While setting up proper email addresses and teaching students how to save documents were very simple, typing wasn't going to be something that students learned over night as a bit more time would need to be dedicated in order for students to get better at the activity. Of course the idea of this was not at all appealing to students, but once I told them how much typing you would have to do in college or how much any job relies on computers, students started to realize the importance of the lesson. I also realized that this couldn't be condense into one lesson plan and that this would need a few days while making sure to revisit this concept later on in the semester. As a result, students were given three days last week to work on their typing skills with the main focus being word count and accuracy.

While there is a simple chrome extension that you can use titled Typing Club, luckily Tri-County offers a semester of a writing class virtually. With the help of my mentor teacher we were able to trim this semester course down into three days while still being able to focus on the main components of typing. At the end of the three day students were given a test to see if they had improved at all from the three days of typing skills. 

Again, while three days is nowhere near enough for students to make significant improvements to their typing perhaps it will inspire in them the idea to become more proficient in typing. Furthermore, we will return this platform a few times throughout so hopefully with the combination of this tool as well as some of the assignments students will do online in the future these aspects will lead to students improving their typing skills. I think students overall did very well simply of the fact that we were able to track their results online and we were seeing signs of progress.

Edu Blog

I came across a really interesting blog this weekend that I would highly recommend for everyone to check out. Its called The Jose Vilson and is a blog about a math educator/activist/speaker in New York City N.Y. While Mr. Vilson does devote many of his blogs to things that are happening inside the classroom he also talks a lot about the elements outside schools that still have tremendous effect on them. These topics range from race all the way to fundraising for school districts.

I would say that after reading a few of his blogs that he is definitely up to date on technology trends happening in the classroom but at the same he is just really aware of his environment on a local, state, and national level with a focus on high needs areas. I felt that I could relate a lot to his blog due to the fact that I grew up in the inner city and that is where I would like to teach after the MAC program. Since my school placement is one of high needs I have already found interesting concepts that I would love to try for my students.

I also felt that I have very similar goals to what Mr. Vilson wants and is doing with his school. While school is now a place where students come to simply receive education, it doesn't necessarily has to be the same way in the future. In fact schools, along with their administration, can be the platform in order to institute real change with any given community. Furthermore, a school with these traits can serve as a model for what other districts should look and feel like. Just an idea in the grand schemes of things.

What I also really enjoyed about Mr. Vilson's blog is that instead of just making it a top down process, where he talks about a multitude of things from his years of experience, he instead has his blog set up to facilitate a discussion between himself and the different readers and users he has on his site. There were a few different blogs of his that I saw where he simply would ask anyone on their thoughts on the subject by just commenting below. I really enjoyed this characteristic he displayed because instead of being someone who thinks they have all of the answers this is someone who is a life long learner and is still searching for better answers and is willing to incorporate anyone to do so.

The way I had found out about Mr. Vilson's blog was through a book he help authored called This Is Not a Test. In this book Mr Wilson highlights race, class, and education and how all of it is linked for people going through the K-12tth school system. While I know our time is extremely limited within the MAC program I would highly recommend that people pick it up and check it out. If anyone plans on working in inner city and high needs areas this book is the one for you.

Here is the message I sent, I still have not received a response

Mr Vilson
I found your blog a couple of days ago and I wanted to mention how helpful it has been for me. I am currently a master's students/student teacher intern at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor, working in a high needs school for my placement during the duration of my program. You mentioned in one of your blog posts about having students realize the importance of voting as certain people have died in the past to be able to have this right and making sure that we are taking careful consideration of the people we elect into office. I think this is of extreme importance as it connects the students to the world that they live and realizing the importance of being engaged, especially in the political realm. I know you have a lot of experience under your belt but would you have any tips for new teachers coming into the field.

Thank you for your time

Best
Muneer K.

http://thejosevilson.com/this-is-not-a-test/

Technology in the Placement

Technology in my placement has been extremely interesting to say the least. This has been due to a number of reasons, one is that there really isn’t any reliable wifi networks within the area to use. We have been thrown back into 2005 where if I actually wanted to show a simple YouTube clip I would need to disconnect the Ethernet cord from one computer and put it in to another that has the video projector. 

Besides a video projector that really doesn’t work as well as it should, there really isn’t any form of technology in the classroom. Teachers have their own personal computers to take attendance and such but even those don’t necessarily work as well as they should. Ironically, teachers are given iPads because they are apart of the Berkley school district, which I find extremely ridiculous since they don’t have any internet to do half of the functions on it.

There are about two small media centers that have about 20 computers each.  Unfortunately many of the programs don’t really work, this has to due with the fact they both have been abused and not been given updates, some are still working on the Windows 2000 operating system. Teachers have to reserve the media center ahead of time since there aren’t any mobile media carts.

What makes this placement even more interest is while there really isn’t a lot of technology, almost every student has a form of smartphone that they often use within the class. There is a policy that they can also use their cellphones within the class which makes matters even more complicated.

Given all of the complications that this placement has I am extremely excited to be there and am trying my best to work with everything given. For example, every time we have had a presentation showing the different tech tools to use, I always got extremely annoyed due to the fact that these were items that I thought I could never use in my classroom. A few weeks in however, I decided to not let the handicaps I had within my placement stop me of still trying to instill some of these really cool tools into my classroom. Instead I just need to be really creative, and I did.

I used the tech tool padlet for my 3 day teach and while I faced some problems using it, I thought it was highly successful. What I did was that I had it all preloaded before I came into class, that way I just had to use the video projector to show the presentation to the rest of the students. I was even able to show them a few videos because those were preloaded as well. I think this really gave me the boost I needed to realize that while I cant choose the level of technology I have in my classroom, I do have the choice of whether or not to have these inconveniences stop me from actually trying to be as innovative as I can.

Checkout the padlets

http://padlet.com/mnrkhalid1/it62thwy3jmd

http://padlet.com/mnrkhalid1/bgw2un1tzubz

Voice Thread

It amazes me ever week that there are all of these tech tools available that I have never even heard of. I was throughly impressed with voice threads and the many features that it had available for free. The name completely threw me off as I thought it was just something similar to Audacity of being able to take audio notes. When Jesse and others presented it last week I realized that we had a goldmine of endless possibilities.

Voice thread I feel is the combination  of the tech tools that we have already looked at. It has a very similar set up and features to socrative and padlet while at the same time having the functions of audacity. I really like the ability to use both audio and video either when presenting new information or when commenting on certain slides. A really interesting function that we tried (with Jesse) was the ability to leave a voicemail in the slide. Voice thread would literally call your phone allowing you to leave whatever message you wanted. While I don't know how much use that would actually have I still thought it was creative nonetheless.

The great thing about voice thread is that I feel it can have multiple types of usage within the classroom. One can simply type up a lesson plan for the day to present to students or embed a video with comments on a slide. If you wanted to get a little more creative you can use the tool for when students are absent by having all of the information but also adding audio and video components so that students understand what is exactly expected of the assignment. Another great aspect is the ability to put the usage of the tool into the hand of your students. I could totally see using audio or video representations when doing short assignment questions since students normally have a better time saying information instead of writing it or using it to give constructive feedback.

On a final note I really enjoyed Jesse Samantha, Jimmy, Betsy and Carl's presentation style. I felt that they had a really good grasp on the class throughout the entirety of time allotted for the presentation. This is something I felt I lacked when presenting audacity and sometimes when I student teach. I have to make sure that I am engaging for the entire time instead of just the beginning. A great presentation all around with the style and the tool that they taught us.

Hope for the Future

Tom Ward instilled a confidence in me I felt I lost 5 months into the program. This confidence was the ability to be creative. Like many other Macers, this one year program has really thrown me off my game with the amount of work I am suppose to do and the amount of information I am suppose to process in such a short period of time. I haven't been able to do what I normally like, which is reading outside of whats assigned in class and being able to just explore different avenues in general. This I feel has become even more important with the fact that I am student teaching and I would love to explore different ideas to use in the classroom. Tom said something however, at the beginning of class that help ease some of that tension in that he was in the same scenario when he was doing this program. When the program was over because he had learned what he had, he felt the need to always strengthen his craft and use different platforms as needed in order to do so. By saying this, Tom assured me that hopefully at the end of this program, I too can use the tools I have learned in it to push my way of thinking and making sure to turn over every rock to do so. Something else Tom showed me was how truly all social media sites in one form of another can help students when trying to explain a concept. While many of the different tech tools that have been presented in class I can see myself using, I really didn't see how both Facebook and Twitter could help in the classroom. Furthermore, because I have a heavy background in social psychology research from undergrad and focused a lot on empathy and narcissism, I was under the impression that these two specific sites with others, were doing a lot more harm than good. Funny enough, Tom showed through the social psychology realm that if one is truly seeing information through the lenses of their students and the background that they are coming from, that you can find tools in the least likely of places. Tom also showed how that not only one subject could dominate the realms of these social networking platforms. If one was to try using these websites in the classroom I figured that one would only do so in the field of humanities, not really giving much thought to stem, outside of just doing a video with whatever material was being covered. Mr. Ward showed, however, with the video of the basketball using geometry, just how wrong I was and even simplified a concept I had been struggling with for my MTTC Professional Readiness exam. He showed how a teacher can incorporate there own strengths (Tom being a coach) with students interest, in order to engage students in higher order thinking. All in all I really enjoyed Tom’s presentation and the aura of confidence that he showed throughout the entirety of the night (even when his presentation wasn’t working correctly in the beginning). I think he is an excellent example of how good a teacher can be with an extremely incredible work ethic and the open mindedness to explore new ideas, all with trying to help better teach different concepts to his students.

Connections Across Disciplines

A group and subject discipline that I decided to focus on was Science that was completed by Tahani, Kaitlynn, and Subha.

Immediately when I saw that the group was going to integrate student’s cellphones in the lesson of explaining electromagnetic radiation, I knew this was going to be a great lesson plan. The reasoning being that they would have students interests almost without even trying because of the fact that cellphones are so common and people are normally eager to participate when they already have the materials to do so. Furthermore, this lesson plan helps with integration into the students own lives which is normally asked either by the students who is completely bored with an assignment they do not like or by the teacher who is trying to find ways to raise motivation among students in the classroom.

Electromagnetic radiation can be an extremely large and broad subject but Tahani, Kaitlynn and Subha did an excellent job of giving very simple and easy to follow steps to complete the assignment on the students end and the lesson plan on the teacher’s side. This is important because instruction isn’t affected if for some reason the teacher cant be in class on a specific day and a student also knows what exactly it is they are working towards and what they will learn as a result. Another aspect that was great was the use of group work and actually having an assignment that would require both to use the entirety of the time in the class as well as something that was challenging but not impossible to do across the board for students. Often times in schools students complete assignments before a period is finished and as a result of that students disrupt the class or become disinterested in the class subject altogether, which is bad for both the student individually and the class as a whole.  Since this assignment is a little difficult in nature it forces all students to work together to foster a community of learning but at the same ensures that they will be busy throughout the entirety of the class.

The only question that I had about the lesson plan was why have the youtube video and determining whether or not it was real or a hoax? I am a little unsure on how whether or not it works relates to the lesson plan.

An important detail that I learned after reading through this lesson plan is making sure to be clear as possible. This is something that I believe I will really have to work on as I am not clear often times on giving directions as well as teaching certain content in the English concentration. Furthermore, I need to make sure that I am engaging students on a metacognitive level with the questions that are being asked as they pertain to the subject. Failure to do so will result in not only disinterest from the students but also a lack of trust in me as a teacher in delivering the content in a way that the students feel that they are actually benefitting from. All in all, a great lesson that I cant wait to use certain aspects from in the future.