Ideas to Inspire

Here’s some Haiti resources for your classroom:

CNN has a 360 degree video from Haiti. It’s a really cool concept, but it’s a little jarring for me. Still, the kids will really like it. If you’re an old geezer like me and get motion sickness from today’s video games, then just don’t click the mouse around.

Boston.com, The Big Picture has a photo essay called The Faces of Haiti.

The BBC has an interactive map about how governments and relief agencies have been getting relief supplies to Haiti.

Another interactive map that gives the damage to different areas in Haiti.

The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century by Thomas L. Friedman is about the economic turn of the world economy caused by technology’s ability to raze global barriers. The  title also alludes to the perceptual shift required for countries, companies and individuals to remain competitive in a global market where historical and geographical divisions are becoming increasingly irrelevant.

What that does for education is that it opens up our classrooms and crushes the “sage on the stage” pedagogy. We may still be boss of our own domain (the pysical walls of our classroom), but we are facilitators of learning (including our own learning), and not the gods and goddesses of wisdom. Shucks!

The positive of this movement is that I have FREE access to quality resources at my fingertips, and without a lot of time commitment on my part. Here’s my example:

1. In the 6th grade language arts classroom, kids are working on a poetry recitation about Africa (tie-in to their social studies research on. . .Africa) They go to the internet link http://www.poemhunter.com/search/?w=title&q=Africa

2. They use their handy-dandy class generated rubric to find an appropriate poem for their group.

3. Maybe they need help memorizing and reciting a poem. I go to google and find:

• How to read a poem: Look at the poem’s title: What might this poem be about? • Read the poem straight through without stopping to analyze it (aloud, if pos- sible). …
  www.englishcompanion.com/pdfDocs/howtoreadpoem.pdf
• How to read a poem out loud by former poet laureate Billy Collins. In fact the link allows me to have Billy Collins talk about reading a poem out loud on this site http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/p180-howtoread.html

4. I found examples of sites with people reciting poems on video

• http://www.poetryoutloud.org/poems/video_bestpractices.html
• http://www.favoritepoem.org/videos.html

5. I created a powerpoint with what I learned from the poets, inserted Billy Collins talking about reading poetry, copied some poems from videos I was going to share with the class and voila – the lesson is ready to go in an hour.

Share Tabs is a free site that allows you to put all your bookmarks in one place for a specific event or assignment. This works much better than handing out a paper of websites to students because they are notoriously sloppy typers that rely on shortcuts anyway, (OMG), so when they are faced with long urls, they are USELESS.

The screen shot is from a workshop that the elementary teachers had with teacher and author Stephanie Harvey on non-fiction reading and writing. The tech teacher would go to every link that Stephanie talked about and by the end of the presentation, she was able to send us the personalized link to Harvey’s resources that she mentioned in her workshop.

We’re trying this with 8th grade science next week where the students will read an article on the hoopla of the 2012 end of the world prediction based on the Mayan calendar, and the students will go to the share tab site to find other science web sites that will debunk the myth with scientific facts.

It’s free, it’s simple, and it will save everyone time so that more teaching can focus on the basics like how to read a website, and what the different entry points are to non fiction writing.

Thanks to Darrell Kim for showing Liana who showed me, your fabulous voicethread creations can be put into your KS blogs. Yeah!

Here’s the link to take you to Darrell’s blog for directions: Embedding Voicethreads post

He’s just more eloquent. And while you’re there, check out Liana’s papa mālaaʻo a voicethread. Cute kēia.

Now that back to school day is over, keep your parents informed about what’s going on in your classes through your blog as well as a wikispaces site.

Advantages of wikispaces:

• students can be the authors of their pages while you still hold administrative power
• videos (imovies, voicethread, flip camera quicktime movies, recordings from photo booth) are all simple to upload to a wikipage
• ohana and other students can c0mment directly on voicethreads from the wikispace rather than sift through drafts of presentations on the voicethread site
• the site is as private as you want it to be
• if someone inadvertently erases some content, it’s easy to fix, as the program tracks who changed what and when
• wikispaces, unlike your school blog, can be worked on from home

Check out the wikispaces sites of some of your colleagues, and if you’re ready to add to your repertoire, I’ll be happy to help you set up a site.

Jerelyn’s grade 8 social studies

Mele’s Papa Nohona Hawai’i