Things 1-7 Capstone Reflection

The first seven “things” have been amazing so far! I’ve been able to grasp how to do each of them (which is surprising enough in itself), but I have also been pleasantly surprised at how useful I have found everything to be. Since I am not in a regular classroom, some of the things adapt themselves better than others to my particular situation, but even those that do not can be helpful to me in my coaching of other teachers where I am often called upon to share strategies or resources, so all the Things will prove useful to me in one way or another.

In Thing 0, I enjoyed setting up my blog, Chatterbumps. It gives me a good example of online journaling which could definitely be used in our classrooms next year when my school adds all the technology we gained from our latest bond. Every student will have access to a computer all day and I could easily see blogging one’s assignments completely replacing the spiral notebooks and workbooks our teachers lug home on a daily basis. Depending on the assignments involved, the use of student assignment portfolios could address all nine of Marzano’s strategies, but especially similarities and differences. Students might be asked to compare and contrast two different characters within a story, or two different themes, or genres in their journals. Students might be asked to summarize an article they read, take notes during a presentation, reflect on their learning, etc.  Students could use their blogs to ask questions, organize their thoughts and focus their thinking. I see tremendous potential in the classroom use of this Thing.

Thing #1 brought very useful information in the form of keyboard shortcuts I can share with students and colleagues as well to improve our productivity and Delicious, the online resource to store important sites and areas of research. Again, this addresses questions, cues and advanced organizers.

In Thing #2 we learned how to use Google Docs to work on tasks collaboratively/ Again, depending on the assignment, I can see this addressing many of the Marzano strategies: similarities and differences, summarizing and note taking, questions, cues and advanced organizers, but also the homework & practice strategy along with the one for cooperative learning. The opportunity to work on things as a group also offers immediate opportunities for Marzano’s objectives and feedback. Activities that incorporated historical investigation like making a “You Be The Historian” page, you even allow the student an opportunity to use the hypothesis strategy.

Thing #3 was about communication tools. Asynchronous and synchronous communication can bring experts into the classroom through tools such as Skype. Back Channel Chat allows students to take collaborative notes during presentations and receive immediate feedback. Marzano’s summarizing and note taking , objectives and feedback, cooperative learning would be well served with back channel chat, and the use of Skype conferencing with another classroom or individual from a different culture would lend itself very well to Marzano’s similarities and differences strategy.

Thing #4 is about content area tools such as Thinkfinity, ReadWriteThink, etc. This gave me a wealth of resources to plan my own lessons, but also to share with my colleagues. In addition, there are many resources for students and parents: interactive websites, suggestions for ways to help your child be successful in school, and also gives opportunities for advanced or continued studies for those children that could benefit from more advanced practice. I see this fitting in with Marazano’s homework and practice, hypotheses, and questions, cues and advanced organizers.

Thing #5 brings to light the very focus of my position as an interventionist--diverse learning and differentiated instruction. UDL strategies and the resources in this Thing were extremely beneficial to me. I gained a much better understanding of the tools that were available to me to remove the barriers for student learning before they occur. Tools like text to speech, text to MP3, and the many other tools I never knew existed help to address Marzano’s non-linguistic representations, help to address diverse learning styles and differentiate instruction. This thing was very exciting to me!

Thing #6 was about digital citizenship. I found the piece on Netiquette very interesting and have posted a shortened rendition of it on my face of the classroom blog for Thing #7. I plan to post a link to the video on cyber-bullying there as well. But, the part of this Thing that I found the most interesting and thought provoking was the evaluation tools for deciding whether a website is a bogus one or if it is a valuable research resource. I could really see that being a great intro to any unit on research and that very nicely addresses Marzano’s similarities and differences and especially the opportunity for the students’ hypotheses.

Thing#7 deals with the Face of My Classroom. This one has been really difficult for me as I no longer really have a classroom with regular assignments to post, etc. So, after thinking about it long and hard, I have decided to use my classroom blog to feature helpful hints for parents, good things to know, book reviews/recommendations from students or faculty, fluency passages for students to practice on at home, links to interactive language building sites and games, and things like that. I would also like to feature writing pieces from students. This would allow me to use Marzano’s homework and practice, objectives and feedback and effort and recognition strategies. Although my blog is in its infancy, you can find it at:  Literacy Lane 

Two Activites I'd Use To Teach Digital Citizenship In My Setting

In one of our future parent nights at my elementary school, I'd like to do a presentation for parents and their children using the Core Rules of Netiquette and the Netiquette Quiz.  I really like the way they are written in easy-to-understand language, making the information accessible to elementary school aged kids and parents that may not be very computer savvy. 
On the following parent night, I'd like to show the video on cyberbullying http://www.digizen.org/cyberbullying/fullFilm.aspx .  This is a little sophisticated for most of the kids in my building, but it might be very appropriate for the parents of our 5th graders and maybe even the 4th graders too.  I'm not sure that our parents are aware of how big of a problem cyberbullying is.  My hometown is a small, rural one, and we are sometimes lured into a false sense of security because of that--but the reality is that a lot of our kids have cell phones and might very well be engaging in this behaviour without our even knowing it.  To ruin a child's life, or God forbid, have one take his life over something like this is unacceptable.  We need to educate each other and make sure our kids use the Internet responsively.
This thing was an excellent exercise for me and it was certainly thought provoking. I'm glad it was included in this course.

Thing # 6 Bogus Site #2

The next bogus site I evaluated was a lot easier to debunk.  The title of the site is buydehydratedwater.com and you can find it here:  http://www.buydehydratedwater.com/

First of all you have to look at content--obviously dehydrated water is nothing.  So to pay money for it is ridiculous to begin with. 

Then continue to look at some of the other pages offered on the site.  I particularly liked this one about franchise opportunities.

And what could be a better benefit package than this:

I think that pretty much took care of Authority/Credibility, and if I somehow still hadn't figured it out, Google leads me only to sites about detection of bogus websites.

Bias/Purpose was pretty obviously written to call attention to our wasteful ways with the envionment--we can't buy our natural resources. 
Navigation and ease of use wasn't really a factor here--the authors of this site made little attempt to veil the satire here.
I enjoyed this site--had quite a few bellylaughs over it, but I would bet money on the fact that kids and sadly, even some adults, would think this was real.

Thing #6--Dedicated to the Memory of P.T. Barnum or How Not To Be A Sucker to Bogus Websites

For your viewing pleasure, I will take a look at two websites I found rather amusing.  I'll use the Joyce Valenza criteria at the BASIC (elementary) level to critically review them since this is the grade level of students with which I come into contact.

The first site I chose was: GenoChoice  http://www.genochoice.com/   a site that suggests you can create your own genetically healthy child online. 

I'll start with Valenza's first area of critical evaluation:

Content:  Does it offer the content accurately and comprehensively?  It most certainly does not. It makes wild and impossible claims.  One one of the screens the user is asked to place a finger against their compuer screen, placing it on the center oval of a strange looking machine that is supposed to then take a reading of my DNA.  I didn't place anything anywhere, but pressed the scan button.  A lot of mechanical looking things on this "machine" began to swirl and spin.  Here's what it looks like:

                                     

After a few seconds, the "reading" appeared on the screen.  This reading consisted of a list of terrible conditions my DNA has shown that I am likely to pass on to my future children. 

After a plea to not let my future children inherit my genetic shortcomings, this was followed up with a checklist with dollar amounts required to fix or remove these genetic threats:

I was then told I could also add certain upgrades (increase in IQ, sports abilities, artistic abilities, resistance to disease, amongst others) and finally was presented with an invoice of charges with the assurance that they could begin working on my baby within a week.

As for accuracy of information, if the prior wasn't proof enough, various other graphics like the following were used: 

This "testimonial" claims to be able to manage her high blood pressure and even dispense her medication using her palm pilot.

The next area of critical evaluation is : Authority/Credibility

Who is responsible for this site?  What are their credentials?  Who else links to this site?

First of all, it appears that the Dwayne Medical Center sponsors this site, but there is no information on the location or the credentials of this place and when I googled for the other sites linked to this place, I found the following information:

The physician who is supposedly the expert geneticist on staff is identified at Elizabeth Preatner, PhD., M.D.

yet no further credentials are offered for her.  When I googled her I found only several listings for bogus website dtecting...lol, usually not a good sign when choosing a physician.   And finally, upon further exploration I found the following disclaimer:

which says it doesn't endorse any test, treatment or procedure mentioned on the very site it sponsors.

The next area to critically evaluate deals with Bias/Purpose:

The only people I read about on the site that had some credentials were two artists who, upon further checking, were joint presenters in a Cirque De Medicine exhibition called Paper Veins in 2002, featuring several submissions that are meant to be a parody of society's beliefs about nature and medicine.  The information stated, "It's actually a bit of fictional humor put up just before the end of the year 2000 by some MIT grad students to satirize "the human belief of nature as commodity" and to "punish the hypocritical and easily offended by upsetting them, and to amuse those who understand."

The final area to critically evaluate is: Usability/Design:

The site wasn't easy to navigate, there was no clearly marked contents area, nor was there a contact us section.  It was not meant to be incredibly user friendly in finding further information.

This was obviously a bogus site, and I believe that even my elementary school students, with the use of these criteria would be able to identify it as such.   Without the criteria, I am POSITIVE they would have thought this is real. 

  

I had never considered the need to teach kids to be critical evaluaters of things they found online--how foolish was I?  Well, I know now, and this will never be left out of any future teaching or discussions I have with kids when we research or surf the Net for information.

Thing #5, Part 4: Vozme

This is just way too cool:

Try this!

Well, using vozme was a breeze--way easier than some of the other text to speech or text to MP3 tools I've looked at.  I am so excited about this capability that I can hardly wait to start using on kids.  I planted the seed idea with a couple of parents who stopped in to see me looking for ways they can help their kids be successful at home.  We spent a bit of time looking at some of the free materials available on the web, and they went home feeling like they had somewhere to go that didn't break the bank and might offer some hope of success for their kids.  I was thrilled to be able to pass on some of the resources I've gathered already from this class and have also presented some of them in our last PD session.  The ability to convert text to speech is an exciting one--but I have blogged about this feature several times already, so I will not belabor the point, for fear this particular chatterbump might become an elephant hole.  LOL.  I have no idea if the try me link works....so check it out!

Thing #5 Part Three: Learnport/ Net Trekker

The task at hand was to create an account with Learnport and use Net Trekker's readability tools to locate materials at three different levels.  I went to http://juicystudio.com/services/readability.php#readingresults and used the very convenient feature of just having to type in the URL to three different sites and it automatically determined the readability of the selections.

I looked up the topic "bald eagles" and subsequently typed in the URL's to three seperate sites that I found on Google.  The first two sites I went to were too difficult for the bulk of my 3rd graders, but could be used with my more advanced students:

The readability of these two sites was 6th and 7th grades respectively.

The third site was:

This site was just right for my struggling learners, scoring late second grade/early third grade readability.

Again, this was a time saving option when attempting to amass materials for a UDL lesson--I especially liked the ability to just type in the URL and have it done for me.  I can just go directly from Google to the reabability tool and get the levels I need.  I can see me using this for myself, but also sharing it with the teachers I coach.  We do research reports in all three grades in my building, and finding appropriate materials to use is sometimes an issue.  If each teacher added site links with readability scales to our school and student share drive, I believe we could make a nice resource available to us all.  

Thing #5 Part 2 Using Technology To Support Diverse Learners

Since I am a literacy coach, I find the audio support for those children who can't access content due to their inability to read the text to be very beneficial.  Our content area teachers struggle with finding materials at the reading levels appropriate for our more challenged readers, and the opportunity to access text-to-speech materials would greatly enhance the learning envoronment for these kids.  I also like the idea of using the text to MP3 capabilities--we see endless possibilities to remove hurdles for struggling learners with this.  Math or science and social studies tests can be downloaded to MP3 files, and the students could use the MP3 player to listen to the test instead.  I also liked the idea of using the text to speech capabilities to have kids listen to their own writing, to aid in editing it.   Sometimes they fail to see their mistakes on paper, but they might better understand thier errors when they hear their own words spoken back to them.