Final Capstone on Things #15-#21

Woo Hoo!  I finished all 21 things!  I am so incredibly proud of myself for wading through all these tasks!  It wasn't always easy for me and sometimes it took me four or five times longer to accomplish the tasks than was published in the time log, but I kept right on plugging away at them and I made it through to the end of the course.  There were lots of chatterbumps along this road, but now that the vibration has stopped and my vehicle's headed for the main road again, it's good to ponder on the bumps and the meanderings I took along the way:



Thing #15 was about Productivity Tools.  In this thing I learned about Media Convert and GoogleDocs and their ability to change the formats of files that are sent to me or that I find in the course of my research that are in a format that I can't utilize in a particular program.  I can use either Media Convert or Google Docs to change the format into one that is compatible with what I am trying to do with it.  I can also use them to convert a pdf file to a text to speech file if I, or a struggling student in my class, wishes to be an auditory learner and just wants to listen to the piece rather than reading it.  In this thing I also learned about Google Calendar, a tool to use to coordinate my comings and goings and one I can share with colleagues to assist in knowing when we have common times available in which to meet rather than playing email tag to suggest possible dates we are able to meet together.  I can also use it to publish my schedule, the best time to call me, and dates I will be unable to offer interventions so that the parents of my students have a better knowlege of what I do and the opportunity to know when would be a good time to talk to me.  I'm all for anything that increases my productivity!  The Marzano strategies covered by this thing are: summarizing and note taking, homework and practice, cues, questions and advance organizers.



Thing #16 addresses Professional Learning Networks.  This thing was about social and professional networking sites like Facebook and Twitter--allowing the sharing of news and view about many subjects of a personal and professional nature.  I had already belonged to Facebook and a Sphynx Cat blogging network and am also part of the Literacy Coach Network through the KISD, so I was already aware of the power of these tools to unite people with common needs, interests, and opportunities. It's a way to stay connected with family, friends, coworkers, and other professionals that leads to a free and open exhange of ideas.  It is a great way to keep parents informed of what is happening in our classrooms and allows students and life long learners to continue to share experiences with and learn from people across the globe.  Michigan LearnPort was also covered under this thing and is a powerful resource offering information, videos, articles and lesson plans covering a multitude  of subjects pertinent to Michigan educators.   The Marzano strategies covered here are Cooperative Learning; Objectives and Feedback; Reinforce Effort and Provide Recognition.



Thing #17 was about Research and Reference Tools.  Most people doing research use a search engine, such as Google,Yahoo or Wikipedia to find information, but is what we find there valid and reliable? This "thing" offered links to educational databases like MeL and RefDesk.com that provide reliable and valid information while saving search time.  I found the Mel databases difficult to use at times and became quite frustrated.  One of the databases, KidsInfoBits was a wonderful resource for my area of teaching needs.  KidInfoBits offered an age appropriate body of easily understood information for the elementary school child.  The entries were presented with the easiest material first and the difficulty level clearly labeled.  This alone will save an enormous amount of time for elementary school researchers.  Many of the entries were also available in an audio format, allowing those children who can't read the materials to still participate in the research.  This thing also provided links to a couple of citation makers like Bibme and Landmark Citation Machine.  These were extremely useful tools which allow a student to type in the answers to a few questions and then the citation makers will make the citation for you in many different formats.  A real time saver when making bibliographies.  The Marzano strategies addressed in this "Thing" are: Summarizing and Note-taking; Similarities and Differences; Homework and Practice; and Generating and Testing Hypothesis.



Thing #18 deals with Staying Informed and introduced us to aggregators and RSS Feeds. I really liked this thing and have already found it useful.  I began a startup page with IGoogle and installed Google Reader which is an RSS aggregator.  It collects the feeds from several blogs I have chosen to follow for both my personal interests and my professional ones as well...and it puts them all in one place, at my fingertips.  I signed up for the rss feeds on the NCTE professional journal and I have already found several items of interest that I read--this is good because I would not have been seeking those journal entries out, yet when they were there in front of me in an easy to access manner, I took the time to read them.  I'm worried about letting my new found skills in technology wane after I'm finished with this class, so I intend to find a good blog to follow that isn't over my head and allows me to continue finding out about current things in the technology field that I might be able to use in my  teaching and personal learning.  The Marzano strategies involved in this thing are: summarizing and notetaking.



Thing #19 The Virtual Classroom--the Michigan Merit Curriculum guidelines that were put into place in 2006, more schools are offering students instruction in a virtual education environment. Teachers can offer blended instruction, or fully online courses on a CMS.  Other Internet tools like Wikis, Blogs, Web Pages, and video conferencing help to open and extend our classrooms far beyond the four walls of our schools or the hours and minutes available between the beginning and ending bells.  I was sent to a wonderful site called CAPspace where I discovered many pretty exciting opportunities to collaborate with other schools, classes, authors, celebrations, etc.  I found these opportunities very intriguing and would like to sign up for my students to participate in quite a few of them.  We were also asked to write a plan to make our classrooms more blended ones.  I plan to use my classroom blog to extend the walls of my classroom by offering weekly lists of skills we've covered in class along with some supplemental materials to enhance or remediate those same skills we've covered in class, at home. I'd like to design a monthly web quest for my students to particpate in and learn from.  I'd like to post videos and podcasts in a weekly hint section.  And that is all just as a beginning.  I'd really like to research things and start amassing an array of resources so I can run my blog easily and efficiently next year.  I'll spend the rest of the year and the summer locating things I'd like to use.  I also plan to design and use Google Doc Forms to make formative assessments for the students to monitor their own learning and offer these on the blog as well.
This "Thing" scared me, but once I got the idea of all the ways I could accomplish this, it was pretty exciting!  The Marzano strategies used in this one were: Cooperative Learning; Questions, Cues & Advance Organizers.



Thing #20 Graphic Organizers and Word Clouds
This one was my favorite!  I have long been a staunch supporter of the use of graphic organizers as a learning tool and was so pleased to find some of the online resources available for their use.   Sites like Bubbl.us and Gliffy offer mind mapping programs and flow charts which help kids put their thinking into graphic representations which solidfy and sometimes even formulate their learning.  Mind maps help us think in an organized and effecient way--allowing a logical progression into deeper thinking.  Flow charts help to understand cause and effect relationships and the passage of time.  The use of the computer to organize one's thoughts into an easy-to-construct thought web is highly motivating.  For those students that struggle with where or how to start, this site offers the perfect way to do it.  I will be using these sites regularly and have already sent my colleagues to them as a strategy to use with a couple of their at risk students. Bubbl.us is particularly user friendly and is extremely easy to teach as well, so it is easily embraced by the regular ed teacher as a classroom tool they won't mind introducing to their students to use independently.  The second offering was theuse of word clouds which I also thought was extremely useful and exciting in that I can find so many fun and motivating things to do with it.  In our school we use The Daily Five which as a daily working with words component.  I will be using the word cloud sites like Wordle and Tagxedo to make lots of fun working with words and writing exercises.  I think I may also be able to use this as a fun formulative assessment since the size of the words in the word cloud are determined by their frequency in the written material from which the words are taken.  So, at a glance, I should be able to get a pretty good idea of what this particular student finds important by looking at his/her word cloud.  The Marzano strategies used for this one are: Questions, Cues and Advance Organizers; Non-Linguistic Rerpesentations.



Thing #21 covers Screencasting and offers the resources to do so with Screencast-o-matic and Jing.  Jing requires you to download the software, but Screencast-o-matic doesn't require you to download anything.  Both have basic versions which are free and with them, you can make up to a five minute video or podcast.  The opportunity to make your own how-to videos and pod casts opens am entire new world of teaching techniques to use as part of a blended or traditional classroom to explain things kids have difficulty mastering.  I made a short how-to video on screencast-o-matic  on how to round off whole numbers.  I made a power point presentation and then easily transfered that presentation to a video format which I narrated.  It was very easy to use the screencast-o-matic and once it was finished it was easily uploaded to YouTube and then embedded into my face of the classroom blog.  I think this is something I will use a lot in the future....and also a fun thing to teach my students to do as well.  There will always be things kids struggle with, and this offers a unique way to handle teaching those skills.  The Marzano strategies used in this "thing" are: Objectives and Feedback; Homework and Practice; Nonlinguistic Representations.



The second part of this capstone assignment is to choose one of the tools in these last 7 "things"and to plan a lesson using one of the seven things.  We are also supposed to include how it will fulfill one of the Michigan Content Standards.  I chose to use the following third grade Michigan Grade Level Content Expectation:
 L.RP.03.05 : respond to and retell what a speaker said, paraphrasing and explaining the main idea, and then extend their response by connecting and relating it to personal experiences.

I'll use Thing #20 visual learning and graphic organizers for my lesson plan.  The plan is to have my students participate in a CAPspace collaborative activity with another third grade classroom.  The assignment will be to listen to an online presentation of a story about the constructing of a snow man.  The collaborative part requires each student to make an art project illustrating their own experiences making a snow man,  then writing a short personal narrative sharing the making of that snowman.  They will then share their stories with a partner from the other classroom in an online celebration event.  The student will then be responsible for summarizing their partner's story to include the main idea and a few of the supporting details and then comparing it to their own experience with their own snowman in a two paragraph piece.  As the final part of the assignment, we'll take our paragraphs to Bubbl.us and make a word cloud art project to display and share with our partners from the other classroom. 

Again, this has been such a wonderful experience!  Tough and time consuming, but well worth every minute I spent on it.  Thanks, Ron and KISD for the opportunity to take this class!

Respectfully submitted,
Susi Meagher

Thing #21 Creating A Pod Cast

I was scared of this thing for some reason, but I ended up having a blast with it!  My hardest task here was to figure out what I wanted to make the pod cast about.  After a lot of thought, I decided to make one about rounding off whole numbers which is historically rather difficult for third graders--they get it when they learn to round off for one place, but then ask them to round to a different place and they are totally lost.  I learned this technique a long time ago--from whom, I can't say, so I can't credit it to anyone, but it's a fun way for the kids to learn rounding and with this technique, they seem to be able to accomplish the task no matter what place I ask them to round the number to.  Anyway, I made a power point presentation, then I used the Screencast-o-matic  to make it into a video, which I uploaded to YouTube and then embedded into my face of the classroom blog, Literacy Lane.
Here is the url for it on YouTube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoKC20wN0yI
I have licensed it with the following creative commons license:

Cinderella Rounding by Susi Meagher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

The next part of the assignment was to share it with friends or kids and get some feedback.  Since it is a Sunday, I posted it on my favorite sphynx blog site, Sphynx Lair and asked for feedback.  One lady showed it to her kids and I got mixed reviews.  Some of the comments were that everyone seemed to like the idea and the narration, good speed, fun use of the fairy tale.  But one of the kids thought there was too much text to read on each screen.  Another liked it all, but without a single exception, everyone found the yellow circle on the cursor to be distracting.  I have to agree, so, before I actually share it with parents and students,  I will have to change that.
I enjoyed making it and when I get those few kinks worked out, I can see myself using this quite a lot to remediate, stretch and enhance skills I am teaching in my groups, so that the learning can continue outside my four walls.  I can see me using this with math remediation groups-demonstrating difficult concepts, I can see a lot of uses for podcasts in phonics or grammar conventions.  Demonstrating the sound/symbol correspondance of the consonant blend or digraph we studied in our lesson today, how to make plural a noun ending in "y", concepts of non-fiction print, and directions on just about anything.  And with the Screencast-o-matic, I can make fun and easy little five minute how-to hints to post with a featured weekly skill on my classroom blog. 
This has been a great class, chock filled with great ideas and things every teacher ought to know.  Thanks for helping me creep into the 21st century...and let's hope I continue to grow in my technology
skills long after I have turned in my final paper.   It's been an honor learning with and from you, Ron!

Thing #20 Visual Learning/Graphic Organizers

The first portion of the assignment was to make a mind map using bubbl.us or gliffy.  I chose to make a mind map about elephants.  I used the concepts I require my 3rd grade students to use in their animal research reports:  appearance/adaptations, habitat, and endangered status.  Within those concepts, certain areas must be addressed.  The use of this mind map would be a great tool for my third graders to use to help them outline what they need to include in their reports.  I like the idea of the parent bubbles and the children bubbles--when getting down to the actual paragraph language, the parent can be the topic or 1st power sentence, and the children can be the detail 2nd power sentences and their children bubbles can be the 3rd or 4th power sentences.  I can see this tool greatly helping them to focus.  I liked this tool a lot, it's user friendly and will be easily understood by those students who normally struggle with organizational thinking. Here is the screenshot of my mind map:

The second part of the assignment was to make a word cloud from my reflection and to post a screenshot of it.  I chose to use Wordle because it was easier to use and I thought that would be an important consideration for when I attempt to have my students use it.  Easy is good!  Ok, so here's my cloud:

What a fun thing!  What a delicious way to play with vocabulary and organize your thoughts in a fun and creative way.  I can see making a fun class book about a new word cloud from each unit of study in social studies, or the vocabulary for the chapter in math we're using, or the attributes of a character in a book we're reading.  I can see doing word clouds for individual students--assign each child a different student, have them write a paragraph describing them and everything they know about him/her, then making a word cloud out of each student's paragraph and posting them around the room--making a game out of reading the words and trying to figure out whose cloud it is.  I think this is a cool tool that makes something that might very well be tedious and unmotivational into something exciting and graphically creative.  The ability to make them, in itself,  is highly motivational, and since the words are sized by importance (decided upon by frequency of use within the writing used), I can see from a glance the most important concepts in the mind of the writer--this gives me a quick gauge to see if the students understand the concept by the words they choose and their importance in the cloud.  Brilliant use of technology here.  Something that seems so simple, yet is quite powerful in and of itself.  You can, of course use it for the purpose for which it was intended as well--brainstorming.  But no matter how you choose to use it, it's great!  This has been one of my favorites!

Thing #19 Virtual Classroom

In the day and age in which we live, we need to plan for the instruction we give to extend beyond the walls of our classroom and after the dismissal bells have rung.  This assignment involved making a plan for a blended classroom.
I plan to:

• Post a weekly schedule of the skills I will be teaching during the upcoming week's worth of LLI instruction, along with links to any supplemental or continuing practice sites or opportunities I can find to further and/or enhance my students' learning. 
• Post a bi-weekly WebQuest on a topic related to one of the Michigan GLCE's for the grade levels involved.
• Post a weekly schedule and the learning targets for each group with whom I meet.
• Post weekly Quizlet formative assessment quizzes for student monitoring of progress.
• Post recommendations for books I think my students might enjoy

I plan to do this in my Face of the Classroom blog.  I'd also like to post a section for new teaching resources I discover for those teachers I coach--things my colleagues might find useful.  I would also like to try participating with the Read Across America activities offered on CapSpace.  It looked like there were some really cool things for elementary kids to do--author conferences,reading aloud and sharing projects--gosh, I saw about 20 things that looked great right at first look.  I am looking forward to getting involved with some of those projects as well.
This will help me use my blog to fulfill the NETS-T standards:
1. Facilitate and Inspire Student Learning and Creativity--  I believe the Web quests will inspire student learning and creativity.
2. Design and Develop Digital-Age Learning Experiences and Assessments--I think the weekly Quizlets for formative assessment and the additional enrichment or extra practice sites will accomplish this. 
3. Model Digital-Age Work and Learning--I believe the ability to communicate and collaborate with students, parents and my colleagues demonstrates this standard.
4. Promote and Model Digital Citizenship and Responsibility--I plan to use the blog entry I have about Netiquette and direct my colleagues toward resources on digital citizenship, copyright and fair use.  I believe this will fulfill one aspect of this standard.
5. Engage in Professional Growth and Leadership--by participating in local learning communities with mycolleagues and a more global community with some of the projects on CapSpace, I feel I will have also addressed at least one aspect of this standard as well.
The second part of the assignment was to play the student role in Navigating the Land of Online Learning and write a summary of what it takes to be a successful online student.  There were a series of questions to answer--is there a cost?  Can I use my own lap top?  Can I access the course from home?  Is it harder than a face to face class?  Is there tech support available to me?  Can I drop it without penalty if I don't like it?  Do I have to do it only at home or at school?  Can I use my lap top at school?  Do I need special skills to succeed in this class?  Will this course support either platform? How many online classes can I take?  These all dealt with the questions to ask before you sign up for an online class, but I think you must also ask yourself if you are willing to take the time and effort it is going to take to complete the tasks--are you self-driven enough to not require someone standing over your shoulder reminding you that the work needs to be done?  Do I have good time management skills? Am I a good communicator? Am I technology savvy enough to handle the work?  Do I understand Netiquette?  Copyright laws and plagiurism?  Do I think I would enjoy it?  I believe you don't have to be a computer wizard, but you do have to be tech savvy enough to maneuver through the tasks without constant assistance.

Thing # 18 Staying Informed With RSS Aggregators

I liked this thing!  I don't follow a lot of blogs yet, but was excited to see there is a way to keep track of everything in one place.  I made an IGOOGLE account and added a few gadgets and changed the theme to cat nap, so it feels like it's mine.  Then I added Google Reader and added subscriptions to some of my personal fun blogs like Nofuratu, The Adventures of a Naked Cat and Sphynx Lair, but then I added our instructor, Ron Houtman's Twitter page and the NCTE professional journal where I already found some articles I wanted to read. We're supposed to take a screen shot of the page and post it showing some of the sites we've subscribed to.  Am not sure what view to have chosen, so I will post a couple views.  I originally had several things to read, but hadn't changed the settings yet and when I scrolled past them they were all marked as read and then it kept showing that I had nothing new to read.  So I went to GoogleReader and took a screenshot of my subscritptions list:

Here's one of the actual IGoogle start page showing the reader with some unread entries:

I've just gotten started on this but I'm excited about it!  It has already begun to change me professionally for the better by allowing me to subscribe to the NCTE journal.  I probably would not have gone to actively seek out the NCTE articles unless I needed something specific.  However, with the articles right in front of me, it was easy to find something to get interested in.  Keeping informed by using this start page and rss aggregator reduces my surfing/catching up with my favorite sites time, thereby increasing my productivity, but even more importantly, inspires me to be a better teacher by keeping me well informed and current with best practices and articles of interest to educators in my field. 

Thing #17 Research and Reference Tools

Writing a research report is one of our third grade GLCE's and finding suitable sites to use has been a chore throughout the years.  My partner teacher sent me to Kid InfoBits last year and it has certainly filled a major void in materials that are valid and appropriate for the younger elementary school student.  I chose to compare Kid InfoBits and E Library Elementary.
Both sites had an elementary feel to them and were relatively user friendly, but Kid InfoBits  was a hands down favorite.  I chose to search "manatees".  Both offered articles and pictures and E Library offered a video of a manatee that was famous for moving up north every year.  The trouble with E Library was, I had to go to the 22nd hit to find even an article that was as low as 7th grade readability.  Most of my little guys wouldn't be still on task if they had to look through that many citations.  What I like about Kids InfoBits, is that the information starts with the easiest to read and has a legend that shows which articles are easy and which are difficult.   The listen function is also clearly present on the page, so if the child is unable to read the selection, they can easily have it read to them.  Also, E Library didn't have a lot of introductory basic information about what a manatee is.  Most of the articles were geared toward 10th through 12th grade.  Here is a screenshot of Kids InfoBits:

 and one of eLibrary:

The second part of the assignment asked us to analyze one of the other databases on MEL.  I chose to take a look at the General One File.  I looked up information on teaching money skills to elementary school children.  The search produced entries from 163 magazines, 56 educational journals, 1 book, 326 news articles and 7 multimedia offerings.  I perused a few of the articles--I had to sort out those that weren't aimed toward elementary school kids--and found them fairly interesting.  I watched one of the news casted interviews with a teacher advocating for starting teaching money skills to preschoolers and giving several examples of activities that families could engage in toward the goal of giving their kids money sense.  I found there to be a huge amount of resources available, but they tended to be more in the realm of theory rather than practical applications.  As for their appropriateness --well, I could see myself using the materials I found in newletters or on my blog to communicate with and educate parents in ways that they might assist their child's learning at home.  As for content--well, many of my searches prior to "teaching money" were fruitless and once again, I found this to be extremely frustrating.  I attempted to look for something on the Holocaust and several other content areas and came up empty handed.  Reliability isn't an issue since this is all part of MEL, which has already been researched for reliability. 

Here's a screenshot of the General One File database:

The third portion of the assignment is to use the MEL citation maker to cite the website of an article I researched.  Here is the article:

and here is the citation, including the website information: 

 Bohi, Heidi. "Teaching children money skills: start early with savings accounts." Alaska Business Monthly 26.4 (April 2010): 134(4). General OneFile. Gale. Library of Michigan. 5 Dec. 2010
http://find.galegroup.com/gtx/start.do?prodId=ITOF&userGroupName=lom_accessmich

The next part of the assignment was to use one of the other citation makers to make a citation of a book or magazine article.  I chose to use Landmark's Son of Citation Machine.  Here's the screenshot:

And here is the citation: 

And here is the citation:  Polacco,Patricia. Meteor!. New York, NY: Putnam Penguin Books for Young Readers, 1996.

 Polacco, P. (1994). Pink and say. New York, N.Y.: Philomel Books.

Thing #16 Professional Learning Networks

"Thing" 16 deals with professional learning networks.  It is important to stay current and involved collaboratively with people we respect in our field.  Our first assignment was to create an account with Michigan LearnPort.  I had already done so for a previous "thing", so I sat down and attempted to take a look at what is available for me at this site: 

Frankly, this is not a very user friendly site.  I attempted to see what courses were available to me, but like with almost everything else on this site, you have to complete a search for what you're looking for.  Almost everything I search for comes back empty.  I was able to find a few video offerings when I was looking for "phonics".   A search through the lesson plan section under addition--nothing.  Under phonics--nothing.  Under the Civil War--nothing.  Very frustrating indeed.  I see that the site offers a search for people with specified credentials, it offers community rooms where people can meet to collaborate, and courses of some kind, though try as I might, I was unable to find what they are. I try to find a tutorial, and again, a search request comes back with nothing.  Perhaps I am doing something wrong, but how can I search for what I don't know exists? 

The second part of the assignment required a sign up with Facebook of Twitter.  I am already on Facebook, so I decided to sign up for Twitter.   After the live meeting the other day when the Ron showed us his Twitter account and showed us how to find people worth following, I was pretty excited about the prospect.  I can see many opportunities for me to use Twitter as a collaboration tool to stay current on issues that effect me professionally and enhance my own professional development.  Inside my classroom, I could see it being a fun way to communicate with some of my more reluctant writers and readers.  Anything that is real world and pertinent to their lives, will motivate kids to read and write.  I can also use it as a community building tool-allowing me the opportunity to get to know my students and their parents far better than I would be able to do otherwise.  I could also use it as a form of parent involvement--parents could know what we worked on in our reading lessons that day and reinforce those same skills at home.  Parents could stay active with tips and hints to help their children be successful.  There were several articles about ideas for using Twitter in the classroom.  I've included a link to one here: http://academhack.outsidethetext.com/home/2008/twitter-for-academia/

I am looking forward to having the time to really start researching Tweeters to follow.  I was very intrigued by some of the ones you shared during out live lesson.

The last part of the assignment involved researching and signing up for a MACUL Space account--now this site was GREAT!!  User friendly, and chock full of things I could instantly relate to--I found a couple of great videos that will fit nicely into my teaching arsenal of narrated books, and there was even a lesson on teaching students the  "_at" family of words.  There are sections for forums, upcoming events, blogs, photos, videos, chat--lots of easy to navigate things to do and ways to be involved.  I liked the chat and teacher's lounge feature where you could throw out a question for assistance or discussion.  There was even an entry about asking people there who might be worthy of following on Twitter--talk about something that was pertinent to me!!!  Could it have been any timelier?    My membership is still pending but here is a screenshot:

I am already a member of the Literacy Coach Network and recognize the value of a collaborative group of people with whom I can learn, be inspired by and with, look to for help when I need it, or support when I need that too.  I look forward to enriching my professional life further with these tools as well.