Tech Tools for the Classroom

I tried out a few tech tools listed on this New York Times website.

I particularly liked the tools meant to help you visualize text, like Wordle and Tagxedo. Although Wordle seems to be the famous one, I actually liked Tagxedo more because it has a few options that Wordle does not. For example Tagxedo allows you to choose the shape that you want your words to be arranged into. It is a great tool to use if you write poems with your students. Not only will it display the most used words in the poem, but it will display them in the shape of your choice, something relating to the subject of your poem. You can create posters that send a certain message - they will be twice as powerful if the image and the words match. I created my own Tagxedo visualizations, which you can see below.

 The first one is the representation of one of my lesson plans in a unit about maps, and the second one is the representation of one of my favorite poems, The Cinnamon Peeler's Wife, by Michael Ondaatje.
Besides poems, students and teachers can use these tools to visualize the main ideas in any text: a lesson, a unit of study, a chapter in a novel or a non-fiction book, a newspaper article, an internet page etc. It is the ideal tool for students that have a hard time summarizing and synthesizing, or for English Language Learners. It can work as a great introduction to a new text: it allows students to see the most used words and they can start researching the ones that are unfamiliar.

The second tool that I tried out was the timeline on the website Timetoast. I actually created a timeline for my dyad placement a few weeks ago, but I used Word. When I used Timetoast I had the chance to see its advantages over Word (you can see my new timeline here). First of all it does a great job of respecting the proportion between dates, it automatically sets each date at the right distance from the previous one and from the next one. This is one thing I could not do in Word, so my Timeline was not very useful as a visual tool. With Timetoast the students will be able to see how close or how far apart in time the dates they are working with really are. Many times we are talking about time periods that are very difficult to wrap our minds around: the history of the Universe, the history of our planet, human evolution etc. A timeline can help our students understand things like this because they are able to see the physical distance between the dates. Of course, it is a great help with smaller time periods too. When our students have difficulty understanding a history text why not ask them to create a timeline instead? We all know how dry and meaningless dates can be - a timeline has the power of making them much more accessible and easy to understand. 
It is not only a history tool, it can be used very well in Language Arts classes e.g. creating the timeline of a novel or even the timeline of a favorite author's life.For young children it can be used as an organizer, a visual display of important events or of the the daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly schedule.

High Expectations

This week the Routman reading gave me new things to think about, namely: having high expectations for all our students. The part that interested me most was the one talking about the fact that we need to make a habit of expecting our students to turn in perfect work, without errors of spelling, punctuation, grammar and capitalization. I have to admit that this is another idea that I thought it is held only by a minority (among which I include myself). More than that, during the last months I started thinking that maybe it is not a good idea to have such a high expectation for the students. When I was in school it was unthinkable to turn in a paper that was not error free. Naturally, I used to have the same expectations for other people, including my future students. Since I started this teaching program I have come to realize that not all teachers think the same. Many of them accept less than perfect work and they argue that this is the only way they can encourage students' writing. I can see how this might be a valid point. I understand that students might be overwhelmed and discouraged by too many requirements and expectations. At the same time, I cannot help wondering: when do we start expecting more from our students? When and how do we transition them from the phase in which it is all right to turn in work with grammar and spelling errors to a phase in which it is no longer acceptable? The 8th grade students in my dyad placement can still turn in writing that is not correctly spelled or checked for grammar. When does it end? How do you remedy a situation like this? It seems to me that if by 8th grade you do not expect your students to write correctly they will never write that way. Or is it really not important? Is writing a dying "art" in the age of technology?

Teaching Writing, Part 2

I was writing last time about the teaching of writing and how I experienced it in my 8th grade dyad placement. I'm coming back to the same subject this week because I had the chance to read my 8th graders' latest essays. Most of the essays did a good job of following the formula that the teacher had presented, but otherwise I had a very hard time identifying good work. The students' voice and opinion was not coming across, the essays did not have a flow, and all in all they did not reach their target. It was supposed to be a persuasive essay, but after reading all of them I realized that the students had no idea what the purpose, look or feel of a persuasive essay is. All they had understood was that they had to fill in the missing parts of the persuasive essay template. So I guess the ideas that I have expressed last week still stand: writing is much more than standardized forms and templates. Teaching it this way does not work. The conclusion would be that new methods have to be adopted, but I am afraid that this was not the conclusion that my cooperative teacher reached... If these methods do not work, what other methods would work? How can you make a better job at teaching writing to 8th graders? How can you engage and motivate students? And how can you change these techniques that do not work if the whole school uses them and has probably been using them for some time?

Teaching Writing

I have started reading Writing Essentials, by Regie Routman. After the first pages I was ready to shout out loud: "Finnally! Someone who thinks exactly like me!" I am comparing this author's ideas about writing with what I am observing every week at my dyad placement, in several junior high English classes. I was surprised to see how heavily teachers rely on rubrics and on standardized formats for every piece of writing that the students are required to do. How are students supposed to enjoy writing in conditions like this? Writing is supposed to be about creativity, freedom and choice. The students that I observe have none of these things and it is no surprise that they see writing as a very unpleasant and time consuming chore. I have always loved writing and I would like my students to feel the same and to see writing as a wonderful and creative escape into a world in which everything they imagine is possible. I realize that writing might be one of the most difficult subjects to teach because it is such a complex and personal task. Writing does not come easily to everybody. There are people for whom writing is a natural way of expression. For others it can be a daunting task. I do not know yet the best ways and techniques to reach these latter learners but I am sure it is not the strict rubrics and directions saying how long the paragraph has to be or how many concrete details it has to include. I am looking forward to reading more about this. I'll keep you posted.

Formative Assessments

While reading the article Up Close and Personal, by Lynn Olson, I realized that today's teaching can and should be very different from the teaching that I received only a few years ago. Why wouldn't it be when it seems so simple and natural to be the way it is described in the article? I am referring to the use of formative assessments to see where the students are and what needs to be worked on. When I was a student the sole purpose of assessment was grading. Students were being assessed in order to get a grade and not because the teacher wanted to find out how much they had learned and understood. This aspect of formative assessment goes hand in hand with the "no secrets" policy by which teachers announce the learning goal to their students and conduct open discussions about the students' needs. I ask myself now: Why not? I have never thought about this before as something important, that the students had to know. I used to think that the objectives represent teacher tools meant to help them plan good lessons. I never considered the fact that the students could benefit from knowing what they are actually learning. This idea of transparency and open communication between teacher and student about learning goals, needs and reasons makes complete sense and it is like waking up in a different world from the one you went to sleep in. In this new world that I envision the teacher is no longer the holder of sacred secrets that she has to hide away from her students. In this world the teacher and the students are partners in the learning process and they work together as a team in order to achieve learning and growth.