Last night, I tried to cook. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you may know that cooking is not one of my strong points. Although I am trying to learn and cook healthy meals with fresh ingredients so that I can keep my children healthy. So, I turned on a pot of water to boil. Apparently, I turned on the wrong burner. I came back in about 5 minutes to check on things and noticed that there was a flaming coffee pot on the stove (I have no idea why there was a coffee pot on the stove in the first place). Thankfully, we were able to put it out with a fire extinguisher and get my wife and daughter out of the house without breathing much of the smoke from burning plastic.

We obviously had to get a hotel for the night. I couldn’t risk birth defects or brain damage for my unborn or my young child. I was, though, blown away by the support from everyone. At TeachMeet Nashville, I was astounded by the level of dedication of my PLN. Last night, I was impressed by their caring. At least 10 people wrote to express their concern and a local friend who I met through Twitter actually offered to help us for the night. I can’t forget @cybraryman1 who offered me his catalog of recipe sites.

Thank you to everyone. Living 1000 miles away from family, I truly value all the relationships that have been forged with m PLN.

I am constantly assessing my students; however, I hate grading. Intensely. It has been wonderful being a school librarian this year. One of the primary reasons is that I haven’t had to grade (I still assessed; don’t get the ideas confused).

I am planning on completely throwing out the way I graded and replacing it with something that is very different and much more meaningful to students. The hardest part, I think, will be getting my students, parents, and administrators (not really if I get the job I’m hoping for) on board as it is different from what most are used to. To give credit where it is due, my thoughts on this have been influenced greatly by Matt Townsley, a math educator from Iowa.

I would like to move completely to grading based on understanding/mastery of standards. This will have to differ a little class by class as Web 2.0 Tools does not yet have standards. MS Office does, I believe, and programming will progress by concept. I tend to be very constructivist in my teaching and most of my assignments for better or worse are open-ended and project/problem based.

At the beginning of the grading quarter, I plan to give students a breakdown of everything that they are supposed to master in the given time. While I understand that students learn at different rates, there are limits placed on how far we can go by school districts and we as teachers have deadlines we have to meet as well. I can modify by student as I get to know them better if need be.

I do not plan on grading homework, if I give any, and I do not plan on giving due dates. Grading based on when a student turns something in feels a lot like grading behavior, not understanding which is counterproductive to learning. As a student demonstrates mastery of a concept or a standard, s/he will receive a grade proportional to the mastery demonstrated. If the child does not demonstrate mastery in a given time, s/he has the rest of the grading period. Once s/he can show me that understanding has been achieved, I will simply replace the poor grade with one that reflects the student’s new understanding. Averaging a good grade and a poor grade does not reflect the student’s true understanding, so I don’t want to incorporate that.

My main concern about grading based on understanding comes from an insecurity I have of keeping every student motivated and working collaboratively in this new environment. So, for at least the first grading period, I will have regular, individual conferences where the student and I can discuss how s/he has spent any independent or group time, which will be a large part in these types of classes, what s/he has learned, and where s/he thinks s/he needs to focus for the next week. I am not including participation as that is a formative assessment that would give me insight into how to help the student achieve understanding. In these types of project-based, hands-on classes, I will not be giving any tests unless required. If I do give quizzes, they also will be used as formative tools to help determine student understanding and guide instruction and interventions.

What do you think? Am I off my rocker? Last year and the year before, I used a points based system. A large part of the grade was participation as well as accumulation of points. I was too lenient in accepting late work according to my own policies and I do not feel that all the grades were truly reflective of student understanding. I think something along these lines would help give myself, my students, my students’ parents, and administrators a much clearer idea of what the students know.

Students are people, just like teachers, and are susceptible to the same whims. Unfortunately, we do not always have a say in what we can teach. In the last week, I have co-taught lessons in physics (work and power, acceleration), biology (kingdoms), the Cuban Revolution, Realist poets, and totalitarian leaders in World War II. No matter how wonderful the student, I highly doubt that many students will be intrinsically motivated to learn about all of these disparate subjects even though there were a handful of students who came in the library for science, history, and English in the span of a week.

Part of our duty as educators is to find a way to make the material we have to teach interesting to students so that they want to learn about it. There are many methods and no one method will work in every situation with every student. However, I discovered a lesson by Angela Cunningham (@kyteacher) that I thought would work well in many subjects. The idea is historical Facebook pages. Her original idea can be found here.

Facebook is blocked here, as it is in many schools. However, close to 90% of students at my school have either a Facebook or a MySpace page; many have both. The hope is that by tying biographical research to something that they like to do, they will get more invested in the assignment than they would if it was a simple biography research paper.

I modified Angela’s lesson some. She used Google Sites; my teachers are familiar with Microsoft Publisher, so I designed my template there. It is actually fairly simple to do. I just took screenshots of Facebook at home, added them to Publisher, and added spaces for students to add information and pictures. Here is a picture of what my template looks like: http://jasontbedell.com/Facebook.pdf.

There are some basic requirements that we tailor to each specific class.

1. A profile picture
2. You need status updates that reflect what was going on in [place] during [time period]
3. At least 6 people the historical figure would be friends with in the “Friends Online” section
4. Basic biographical info in the “Information” section
5. At least 3 Facebook-style groups that your figure would belong to.
6. Suggestions of 3 people in that your figure might have something in common with in “Suggestions.” (For example, an English teacher asked people who wrote in a similar style and a history teacher asked for people with similar political views.)
7. At least 2 advertisements of products from the time period in the “Sponsored” sections.
8. At least 1 important event going on at the time in the “Events” section.
9. Language can also be modified. The English teacher required period appropriate language and the Spanish teacher is considering having her Spanish 4 class do it in Spanish.

In the last week, I have done this project with a Spanish teacher, a world history teacher, and an English teacher. The history teacher focused on totalitarian leaders during World War II – see details here. The English teacher focused on Realist authors – see details here. The Spanish teacher focused on Cuban revolutionary figures – see details here. Next week, an English teacher wants to do it with English Romantic poets and a US history teacher wants to do it with important figures from the 1960s.

In all 3 classes that have done a variant of the project, the students were interested, engaged, and produced good work. One of the teachers actually made a point to stop by to tell me that she heard the kids saying “This is cool” and enthusiastically showing the students who had been absent how to work on the project. The teachers were all enthusiastic and that carried over to the students. The students were interested and enthusiastic; the students’ hard work and interest then refreshed the teachers and classroom morale went up, at least for a little while. I only have access to 2 examples (They were turned into their classroom teachers, not to me.) at the moment. Here is one on Emily Dickinson and one on Fidel Castro.

There are several aspects of this lesson that I think are worth noting. Obviously, it is important that students like it, at least so far. However, there are also some important educational points. Compared to a normal report, this type of assignment is almost impossible to plagiarize. It forces students to try to understand what would have been important enough to the person that they are studying to write about. They need to make important connections between their historical figure and larger world during that time period. If anything, research may be more intensive than during a normal report. They have to have an understanding of not only the person that they are studying, but the time period, the culture, the place, the language, and other important figures from the time period.

If you want to try it out, click here for the Microsoft Publisher temple.

Here is a video on how to use the Publisher template. You may have to turn up the volume.

Historical Facebook Pages from Jason Bedell on Vimeo.

How do you get students interested? Please leave some ideas in the comments.

One person who filled out the Google Form mentioned including anecdotes. I really like this idea as I do not want to make the mistake of separating theory from practice. However, I believe that both we and others can learn from our failure. Over the last several years, I have learned that is it good to appear human in front of your students and peers. It makes them feel more comfortable with you and to learn to trust you. I would like to ask help of you one more time. Can you recount in the comments a time when technology did not work properly for you, how you recovered or wish you had recovered, and what you took from that lesson. Please specify whether or not you would mind if I included it in the book. It can either be done anonymously or with full attribution to you (Book will be released for free, so I am not promising any financial compensation.).

To start, I have always been competent with technology. I rarely encounter a problem that I cannot solve. Unfortunately, I have not always been competent as a teacher. My first year teaching, I planned a fun poetry wiki project. This required the Internet because the students would create their own pages on the wiki and post their own original works.

Unfortunately, the ethernet port that you plug the computers into to get to the Internet broke off inside the wall. After spending 10 minutes handing out laptops and another 5 giving instructions, I realized the students could not get online. The students chatted pleasantly while I tried to figure out the issue. After I realized the problem, I thought I could solve it. I spent at least 20 minutes trying to fish the port out of the wall with paper clips and scotch tape. I tried to use my screwdriver to break the cover off, but a student thankfully informed that it wouldn’t be a very good idea. As this was going on, the students chatter grew louder and less pleasant. At this point, at least 40 minutes had gone by. Defeated and frustrated, I had the students put the laptops away and the next 10 minutes was a wasted teaching opportunity.

I was too inexperienced to understand how to react properly. In this instance, I did not teach my students to adapt. I wish that I once I had realized it was not an easily fixable problem, that I had the students come up with ideas for their poems, start writing drafts, and depending on how far they got, collaborate and peer edit. The technology made sharing easier, but in this instance, the lesson could still have worked well without it. If I really thought the wiki was essential, I could have just pushed it back a day or two until after the students were done writing. This was a simple mistake, but it had a lasting impression on me as it taught me to always have a plan b. Now, no matter what, I always have at least an idea, if not a full plan, of what to do it the technology does not work. Technology can greatly benefit teaching, but teaching can still happen without it. That was an important moment in my first year.

Now, if you don’t think that I am a terrible teacher (and if you’re still reading, hopefully you don’t), please share a story of your own. It doesn’t have to be included in the book if you do not want it to, but I feel that it can make teachers feel more comfortable using technology and more comfortable with the fact that they won’t always succeed if they see that the pioneers and models (Hint: if you are reading a teaching and technology blog, you are probably a pioneer and leader in your school, even if you don’t realize it.) have been in the same place that they may feel they are.

What you see below is the initial results of our collaboration. If you want, feel free to use or modify the lesson. Preferably, if you have any suggestions, let us know in the comments so we can possibly try to implement them as well. This is a 3-day lesson where the students are given creative control to make a radio broadcast as though they were doing so in the 1920s. It attempts to cover the following TN State Curriculum Standards by having students doing in-depth research and then learning from each other’s broadcasts.

Standards in the 1920s unit:

SPI 7.3 Recognize the progress of political and social reform in America during this era (i.e., WomensSuffrage, Regulation of food and drug, Initiative, Referendum, and Recall, protection of workersrights, Antitrust Supreme Court decisions, Muckrakers).

SPI 7.5 Recognize the new trends, ideas, and innovations of the 1920s popular culture (i.e., radio, automobile, phonograph, Prohibition, birth control, organized crime, sports).

SPI 7.8 Read and interpret a primary source document reflecting the social dynamics of the 1920s. (e.g. HarlemRenaissance, Lost Generation, Upton Sinclair).

SPI 7.9 Compare and contrast the philosophies of DuBois, Washington and Garvey.

I’ll be posting more collaborative lessons in the future as I work with teachers. Any lessons I post are always released under the Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. so you are free to use or modify them. We would really like to know what you – my personal learning network from Twitter, Facebook, my district, and the wider Internet – think and how we can improve.
1920s Radio Show

This is the survey that students will have to fill out on the project and how their group members performed.



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License