CatchUp with SketchUp

 

A few weeks ago I decided to procrastinate on some school work and began to play with Google's SketchUp.  I watched an educational video where a history teacher incorporates the principles used in SketchUp to have his students recreate buildings from the era that they are studying.  They then, post those to a webpage that they create and write about the significance of the era, the building, and any important folks of the time.  It sounded as the class is collaboratively rebuilding an awesome history book.  Immediately I was into it.

I knew I wanted to look into it for Geometry class since it is free and it can

help me to apply some of the rules that we learn in the class.  The program itself is pretty complicated, however, I found that it also offers some tutorial videos that were recently produced.  These videos take you through so many aspects and break it down into all of its simplicity.  Within minutes, I created a three dimensional house where I could walk through the door and explore the inside.  One of the cool things that I thought about while doing this was that I was probably going to use this program to help me finish my basement sometime in the future.

So back to the educational value for my students.  I wanted them to experience some of the power of SketchUp.  I noticed one of the other math teachers does a tessellation project with his students at the end of the year.  I was finishing up the semester with my students and I told him that my students would be able to create something just as good as his best or even better.  My goal was for them to design their projects using the tool and then recreate it using colored pencils.  What I found out was that it took a really long time if they were to recreate it so I nixed that idea.  I showed them how to do different tessellations each day for a week and gave them 15-20 minutes to create their own designs using the principle learned.  On the week of their midterm, they were to design a unique tessellation that had a theme and incorporated at least two tessellations.  What was created was amazing.


One student created a design that portrayed the game MineCraft in 2D.  Another student created a snowflake using some of SketchUp's 3D features.  Other students never finished, but to give you an idea, one created a design with Black Widow spiders and another student was creating a windmill out of fans.

I am so blown away by the power of this program that I need to sit back for a minute and find out exactly where it can be incorporated.  If I were to introduce this early in the year, who knows what could be designed by the end of the year.

Anybody KHAN do it!!

 

Well, this week I received a bunch of messages from teachers and friends alike.  "Did you see the 60 minute video on Khan Academy?"  Now, I have seen Khan Academy before, linked some of the videos to my lessons, peruse the app once and a while...............but what was all of the hype about?  Why so many messages in such little time?  I'm finally just accepting the fact that I am the geeky friend of some people.  Whatever the case, it was time to see what this video was all about.

 

So after watching it, I went into the website and started playing with the program.  I noticed first of all that there was a lot more to it than just a series of videos.  Although there is an enormous library of videos teaching the subject at a surface level, there are also a lot of skills tests that are associated to a lot, but not all of the videos.  See if your an expert at addition and if not, you can watch a video and go back to practice your skill.  A little energy bar lights up as you get questions correct and points are accumulated for something.  If you get questions wrong you lose progress in the energy bar.  You need to fill the energy bar in order to show some sign of mastery.  There were also many other incentives dealing with "badges".  Collect badges and become elite.

 

Anyway, I was interested from it on a teacher's end as well.  So I opened up both of my google accounts, that's right, I said it, both of them.  One as a student, one as a teacher.  I wanted to see how easy it was to manage and as I predicted, it was very easy.  It was easy to create classes, add and delete students from the class and it was easy to see their progress.  It would collect all of the data that they accrued while they were on the site.  How many attempts at a problem, how long they were on an exercise or video, whether or not they need help or if they showed mastery.  It had everything.  They are currently linking everything to the national common core and trying to get their video collection done for all of their skills lessons.  It was quite extensive.

 

I am not one to wait around, so today I tried it out with the students since I've been having them complete any assignments on a black and white page in a while.  They loved being able to try it out.  They were into trying to get the little energy bar up so that they showed completion.  One girl must have done over 50 problems and it gave me time to work with her.  It did not have a video associated with it, but I did not mind showing them how to do a couple of their problems.  The more a student gets wrong, the more it seems they need to get right to show mastery.  Later on, I checked out the progress report as a teacher and it had everything that I witnessed.  Even the girl who was having trouble was red flagged on my account.  It wasn't hard to get them on it and to start having them practice.

I can easily see this type of skills based format become a main part of education.  I like the idea that they are receiving the surface level teaching from someone else along with a quick practice.  Watching some of the videos on the site it shows how to implement it into the classroom and I can see me do something of this nature.  Have students work at their own pace until a few of them reach a certain checkpoint and then have them go a little deeper into it with an authentic problem.  On the other end, in use with an authentic unit, this could be the overt knowledge that they get and then can create something with their knowledge..........a rap........or a video.  Something.

There are a ton of other videos in Science and Economics as well.  I'm not sure if they are as streamlined as the math, but they are there as a one stop shop.  Pretty cool stuff.  I definitely see me utilizing it in the future.

 

My Light Bulb

Driving down the road the other morning I'm sitting there thinking about the music.  A little bit of 80's rock, jamming out to "Tarzan Boy".  I haven't heard that song in forever and I start reflecting on the first time I heard it.  My parent's study, on the lime green chair over my JVC boom box.

Out of no where, it hits me.  The light turns on in my head and I'm now thinking about how easy it would be for me to incorporate a Wiki into one of my lessons.  My students are in AFDA, a high school course dedicated to functions and algebra.  However, one of the sections is learning all about financing.  I have a few seniors in my class and the rest juniors.  I thought, they are soon going to be going to beach week and I remember watching a video when I was learning about Wikis by a group named CommonCraft.  They broke it down to a quick and easy 3 minute video that just made absolute sense.  Basically, wikis for dummies.  

I decided to take the idea that CommonCraft uses of building a camping trip using a wiki and have them build a Beach Week trip using the wiki.  Now, I have done the same with middle school, but this one had to propose a little higher math.  Since some of them have jobs, the propose questions would be, "How many hours would you have to work in order for you to save up for beach week?".  They will need to research the taxes that get taken out of Virginia paychecks, think about car rental places and insurance, look up rental properties and so on.  I even think that they could use part of the Wiki to do a price budget of food like we did my summer program when we learned how BlackBoard could help out in collaboration.

So, I'm not sure what sparked this idea to pop in my head.  In fact, it was quite frustrating and I missed the rest of the song.  Luckily, I was on Pandora and I quickly jumped over to Spotify to put it on my playlist.  Problem averted and Tarzan Boy was back to bless the airwaves in my car.

Commutes and Podcasts

For a few years now I have been listening to podcasts.  When they first came out, I was listening to them sporadically and had no interest in hearing what other people had to say about stuff.  That's how I felt about them.  People simply talking about stuff because they had nobody to talk to in their community that would listen to them.  BUT, some part of me thought there was some value and I didn't forget about them.
I started looking for topics that I was always researching on the web.  Technology STUFF and education technology STUFF.  Once I had a focus of what it is I wanted to hear people rant and rave about, I was hooked.  My library is not extensive for podcast, but it keeps me interested for the duration of my hour ride to work sometimes when I don't want to listen to music or the stupid news AND I don't want to be listening to all of the thoughts in my head.  I simply used them to get ideas to research later on the web.  If you're reading this, you probably are in the same course and you probably like your job enough to enjoy researching new stuff.  I get all of my podcasts from iTunes, but here are some of the things that I listen to and their sites.

The Tech Teachers - 2 teachers that are easy to listen to and talk about sites that could be used in school and technology affordances.

The Tech Chic Tips - A podcast with tips for educators about using technology in instruction to engage students. 

Ed Tech Crew - A weekly podcast about technology in education.

November Learning Podcasts - Cool interviews with educators who are pushing the edge.

Teacher 2.0 - Short snippets aimed to harness e-learning tools and engage students.

School Sucks - Sometimes it's common sense, sometimes it's crap, but it does provide me with the other side of the coin and help me think about what's wrong with education.

MathGrad - Mathy stuff connected to real world concepts.  It helps me bring ideas into my curriculum.

Political Thinking In Your Head

So I came across this article a few weeks ago that my wife sent to me.  Now, just to give you a quick idea of who I am, I do not like how politics are handled these days, I have not and never will solely sell myself to one "party", and I think the games that are played in the political ring are childish and unforgiving.

With that said, this article struck a nerve with me.  Not because of politics, but because of how different sides of the political ring think.  In the research conducted, people are hard wired to think the way they do based on genetics and obviously some learned behaviors. In a nutshell, Republican will stand their grounds and not bend, they want to see things stay the same.  Democrats are a little more wishy washy, but want to see change and progress made by taking chances.  Two opposite sides of the coins.  It summarizes the article by stating that if Democrats want to see change happen, then they must stay convicted to one item and not jump around to a bunch of different ones.  That would be the only way that the two "thinking" groups could ever find a common ground.

I was amazed that this same song and dance truly happens in education.  There are those that want to keep it the same because it is what they know and it is safe.  There are others who are progressive and want to see it change at the rate of society.  I would really like to know who will win this all out war of ideals.  What did make the most sense though is that if we do want to see change in education, we can't change it all over night.  We need to stick to one thing, back it up with data, and sell it to the people who are digging their heels in the ground.

There are a lot of affordances for wikis in the classroom.  I have used them and found that they are a great treasure to deposit a bunch of math concepts on.  Students really have had a lot of individual fun on them as well.  My first experience with them was in the summer of 2009.  I had my students simply use them to work on tests together without talking.  Each group had their own page and would collaborate by putting down the answers and members would either change the answer or simply do the other problems. I tend to use summer school to experiment with these types of technologies without any formal training.
My next experience with using a wiki was to redo my home page for school.  It gave me more freedom and it was easier to use.  CHECK OUT MY OLD SCHOOL WIKI.  Again, the whole idea of the wiki was still in its infancy in my mind and I really had not figured out how to use it well.  Without enough time to see the benefits in education, I really was only playing around with it so that I can learn it and hoping some sort of lightning bolt of knowledge would hit me.  I was also learning so many other tools at the time that I had no idea which were good or bad.  They just all seemed new and fun and I wanted to introduce the students to all of them because I knew other teachers would not.  This turned out to be a very bad thing when trying to promote change in a classroom.
The last time I used a wiki in class, I had the students working on it.  They were each in charge of posting our notes on it each week.  For each lesson, they were to link a video, a picture summarizing the topic of discussion, a game site(if found), and a link to definitions of the math words learned.  It proved to be too much management for me and a lot of extra work for the students.  The idea was for them to be creating a hypermedia presentation for reference.  Students would then build on it from each class and each semester.  I did not feel I had enough time to teach a wiki and teach the curriculum.  I now know that I do.
If this class has taught me one thing, it is that scaffolding is a very powerful principle in school.  I can, and probably will, go back to the wiki idea.  However, this time, lessons will be scaffolded in a way that it will not only teach the students the layout of a wiki, but allow them to creatively add on to it as well.  I do not have to manage it as I thought I did.  I would rather let it be more of an organic thing.  As time goes on and more people add to it, more will want to add to it and make it better.  It could ultimately end up being a great piece of work.
Stay tuned for Wiki 2.0 in my classroom, it might take a while, but it could prove to be one of the best references in Loudoun.  Especially, if I reach beyond the school walls and have other schools participate.

Blog? Yes please.

Over the past few years, I have been amazed at how far online publications have become a part of my life.  I currently subscribe to over 15 different educator blogs and learn ideas about   not only what others in my profession are thinking, but what they have to offer to the educational community.  At this time, I am simply offering my lens of how cool I think these things are.  I have read everything from why we should not give homework across every curriculum to seeing some of the coolest approaches to my subject matter.  From other teachers giving 30 day initiatives to becoming friends and communicating with them on Twitter.  In fact, from blog to twitter, I met a few of these people when I went to a conference in summer of 2010 at the ISTE conference.  All of us had a common goal.  A goal to transform education or at least do our part to bring a different approach to how we presented information inside our classrooms.  I have also joined people in webinars along the way.  All because I found their blogs interesting and inspiring and had to take that relationship a little further.

At the beginning of 2010-2011 school year, I naively wanted to introduce blogs into my classroom simply because I could see some of the affordances of them.  I had one of my classes put up all of their presentations online and begin keeping their digital lives archived.  I furthered lessons by keeping my assignments online and commenting on what they were doing.  On the student blogs, they added links that connected them to websites that they would frequently use in my class.  They used them to reflect on their assignments using questions that I had posted.  I also had them begin keeping a diary of vocabulary.  Unfortunately, this proved to be too much work for me and I had to drop it.  Managing their use of the blogs along with building my entire curriculum around teaching the uses of these things proved to be a lot of work that I was not willing to attach to their grades.  I have tried blogs a couple of times because I have seen the power of them.  My most successful story of students learning blogs is that one of my students has managed to keep tuning into his..............and that to me, makes it all worth the effort.  Here is an example of the blog I keep coming back to you.  You will notice my students will be down on the left side, most or all which have not been touched since they were part of my classes.

The thing that will always keep my mind shuffled is that my students were able to intelligently understand the use of blogs.  They searched the internet and found others that they were interested in.  They hated keeping their own up to date because it was subject related, but were also able to see value in the ones that they had read.  The optimist in me simply wants to think that blogging was so new to these students that they had a hard time seeing their own benefit of using them.  I want to think I planted a seed that will lead them to a path of connecting to other people's knowledge and thoughts.  With the population that I teach and the adult troubles that they face, it is important to see that they are not alone.