Science models

One of my students, Torreyion, was so excited about his chemistry project that he asked me to post it on my blog. So here is a pic of some models that he made and the cool effects of the camera that he got:

My best post ever!

I hinted on Twitter last week that I was anticipating great things. I mean we had our state tech conference and March Madness, but I also had a secret that I hoped would come true.

Well today I accepted a history position at Kent Innovations High. It is a new project based school starting next fall through our county intermediate school district. It is part of New Tech High that is spreading in the mid-west.  This school integrates the curriculum of the four core subjects into student centered projects. It also works with local businesses to give students real problems to solve. This model of school represents so much of what I believe is best about learning.

The crazy part about this job is that it starts right after spring break. The staff gets all spring and summer to get to know each other, be trained,  and design the curriculum! We will actually be given time to be prepared to make this work. The school space is also being re-modeled so that it looks more like a Starbucks than a traditional classroom.

I can not really express how excited I am about this opportunity. There have been disappointments the past couple of years that I did not want to express publicly, but I am seeing that it is all working out for the best now.

I will continue to blog here in a similar fashion, but the focus will naturally turn to what we are doing in this school. I will also probably blog about history more, but will cover all core subjects as our projects will be integrated. I hope we will also be helping students to use on-line tools to collaborate with others and share their learning. I will be calling on my online community to create interesting learning opportunities for my new students. I can't wait to get started...

Scratching the Surface

I have mentioned the Scratch video games my 8th graders designed with students in Vietnam before. We have finished the project and I want to tell you my evaluation of it. Overall we had some higher quality games created than last year, but we still did not reach the level of collaboration I had hoped for (I tend to focus on the negative as I am always looking for improvement). Here is a link to the mostly completed games that you can try out yourself.

Learn more about this project

The biggest struggle with this project is the time zone difference of 12 hours and lack of time overall for the project. One of the goals we had this year was to try to have students build relationships with each other. Students made and shared videos with each other at the beginning of the project. Unfortunately we never had time to make more videos and one was not enough for them to get to know each other. I would love to use Skype if we were closer in time zones. Students also used email to share their games back and forth but often forgot to send messages or did not explain themselves fully. Designing games is complicated and requires better channels of communication. Some of the groups worked on different versions of the same game.

Learn more about this project

I still believe this project is worth the effort to do and that it can teach students many things about programming and problem-solving while exploring cultural similarities and differences from another part of the world. Improvements would be to encourage students to communicate at home through chat, Facebook, or Skype. We also would like to try some easier activities to build community between our classrooms before we start a challenging project like programming. We also need to stress to the students the importance of clear, daily communication. Perhaps we should use a Google Doc that they could constantly edit their ideas, progress, and struggles in.

Learn more about this project

If you are heading to MACUL I will be presenting on this project focusing on the importance of building relationships in a session called Relate, Collaborate, Create. Stop by and join the conversation.

"Making Waves" Videos

This is a follow up post to my 7th grade Wave Video project. I want to put down my final thoughts evaluating it and how I can improve on it next time.

First of all it took much longer than I expected. We spent about three weeks on the project when I thought it would only take two. It also lacked a bit of focus in the beginning. I did not have any specific examples to show them and it was hard for them to visualize what they were supposed to do. I told them to think about a Bill Nye video how he jumps from talking to video back and forth to make it interesting. I also introduced too many new tools and options to them at once. I think they were overwhelmed by the openness of the project and needed less choices and more structure. That part is really hard for me because I want to challenge them to be as creative and give them as much choice as possible.

The original plan was for them to make a storyboard in PowerPoint as an outline of their presentation. This was not supposed to be their actual presentation. They had a hard time understanding this and did not want to make a second one. The science topic, waves, was also not a particular easy one for them and some of them picked sub-topics that were not really under the main topic such as microwaves and heat waves.

We also had multiple technological problems getting everything to work. I spent so much time on trouble-shooting software that I could not give enough feedback about their ideas and process as we went along.  Unfortunately many of them turned out as screencast slideshows of power point while they read facts from wikipedia that they did not even understand.

I will share two of the best ones, what I like about them, and how I will improve this project next time.



This group got the main purpose of using multiple tools to present the information in multiple ways to make it interesting. They used Powerpoint, Pivot, and a collaborative online whiteboard. They put everything into Camstasia Studio and edited it together in a smooth manner. I wished they would have recorded their narration in my closet so they did not have the back ground noise, but overall it is quality content and work.

Jeremy
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This group used my Pulse smartpen to create a video modeled after the work of RSA Animate such as seen here with Sir Ken Robinson. They wrote out their script and practiced the drawing ahead of time. Then they did it "live" in the hallway and recorded as they drew. On top of the presentation method they explained the topic well and used creative examples. They edited out mistakes in Camtasia for their final product.

One thing that stands out about both of these examples is the creativity of the presentations and using their own words. I plan to show these as examples the next time we do this project. I also am going to make my own storyboard for the first video in PowerPoint to show the students the difference between a storyboard and a finished product. A further thing that will save the students and myself alot of grief is that we will have google accounts and use Documents and Presentations to share work instead of email. Enough of the students did not have email accounts to make this a major pain.

We spent alot of time talking about plagiarism, especially of images. Next time we will also talk about plagiarizing of words and ideas also. I really believe that having student examples will help. I have worked out enough of the technological kinks that next time I should be able to spend more time helping students with ideas and design.

Wave videos

by Today is a Good Day

7th graders in my Tech. class are making videos. I am working with the science teachers in my building on this project. Each pair of students has picked a sub-topic under "Waves" which they are studying in science right now. They are making 2-4 minute videos to present back to their science classes.

The first task was for them to brainstorm by making powerpoint slides for each section of their videos. Although I showed some similar videos from mathtrain to give them ideas the students had a hard time understanding what I was asking them to do. I was throwing a lot of new stuff at them as I gave them multiple tools to use (my wikipage of resource for the students). We have Camtasia Studio 7 on all of the computers in my lab thanks to a great grant from TechSmith. So the students will put their end product together in Camtasia.But they have many options to make it with including screencasts of PowerPoint, my Pulse pen, online whiteboard, webcam, microphones, music, and even Stykz. I encouraged students to use multiple methods of presenting which they will combine in Camstasia. I will write more about some of these tools after students finish, but I will just mention the online whiteboard is a very nice tool that students can email to each other and both write on the same space at the same time.

We have used this opportunity to talk a lot about creative commons and open source. This topic is very foreign to them. For their entire school career they have gotten full credit for plagiarizing from their textbook by "cutting and pasting" the answers to the questions at the end of the chapter. Then teachers get mad at them when they do the same thing on-line. We spent considerable time talking about copyright and the rights of artists. I also demonstrated repeatedly how to use tools like Compfight.com and Flickrstorm to search Flickr for creative commons images. But Flickr is not a good source of pictures about many of the types of waves they were researching so I also taught them how to do a creative commons search in Google and used usa.gov and wikimedia commons which have more scientific images.

We also talked about slide design in Powerpoint. I showed them how to make a set of slides based on interesting pictures instead of text-heavy with bullet points, clip art, or animations. All of this took much longer to get started actually making the videos than I anticipated, but I think we have learned about many important principles along the way. This week they will get busy making them and hopefully have some great presentations by the end of the week.

Why I don't like teaching technology class

I have a philosophical beef with "Technology Class" because I feel that technology should be used appropriately in all classes rather than as a stand alone. Truth be told I would like to get rid of all "classes" and "integrate" all classes into each other not just technology.

But I defeat this philosophical problem by trying to make my class project-based integrating all other classes into mine as much as possible. Therefore students do not spend every class in front of a screen, but also build and create things. In the process they write, calculate, research, collaborate, and present. In many ways I think this approach could be a model for how to set up a whole school. Now I do not always do all of these things with every class and I do not always go as deep as I would like either. Which leads me to the title of this post ...

I do not like teaching technology class because it is a nine week class at my school. At the end of every quarter we wrap it up, ship 'em out, and bring in a new group the following week. I find it difficult to teach using many tools/methods I would like. For example blogging and Google Docs. It takes a lot of time to set up the accounts and show how to use them properly. By the time students are really getting the hang of them my class is over. Also if I want to have a long-term collaboration with another school it is not enough time to really invest in the relationships.

Last year I got to teach one 8th grade section for a whole semester and it was great. Unfortunately there were a lot of scheduling issues and my class went back to quarters this year. Which leads to the other reason I do not like my nine week class. It is hard to get to know students and build relationships with them. I feel like I am just getting to know my students and they are gone. A few drop by to say "hi" from time to time, but my classroom is isolated in one corner of the building away from almost all of their other classes so I may not even see most of them in passing for weeks.

So when I read other people post about long-term projects and building relationships with their students, I get a little jealous. The best I get is to have the same student for one quarter for three years in a row. How do other teachers with constant "shift changes" build long-term relationships with students?

How I laid out the square

Here goes my attempt at explaining how we laid out a square parallel to our school around a circle with diameter of 21'. I must confess that I did the math and started by having some students help me in class. I ended up having two students stay after school with me for about an hour to finish the layout.
First,I may have been unclear in the previous post but the circle already existed that the square needed to go around. So we measured 12' 6" off the building in two spots outside of the circle to establish the east line of the square parallel to the building. We put stakes in and ran a string line. Next we measured over 21' from that line to establish the west side of the square also parallel to the building. That was the easy part. The tricky part was finding the corners.

(The building is on the east side and west is up on this sketch)

Our reference points were the furthermost northern and southern points of the circle. These points are the midpoints of the north and south sides of the square. But how did we establish  another point to create a line that it is perpendicular to the east line? If you are thinking Pythagorean Theorem that is part of it, but how do you find the corner? You guess, of course. Mathematicians, in the real world sometimes you have to estimate.

We multiplied a 3-4-5 triangle by 3 to get the dimensions 9'-12'-15'. We measured 12' off from the east string in line with the midpoint. Then we held a string from the east string to the west string so that it barely touched the stake and we "eyeballed" it square with those lines. We marked the intersection between this string and the east string with a sharpie on the east string. We measured over from this mark 9' and put another mark on the east string. Next we measured from this mark to the stake (the hypotenuse) and it should have been 15'. Of course we guessed on our corner point so we were off one inch and it measured 15' 1".  We corrected this by shifting the corner and this point north 1". Now the hypotenuse measured exactly 15' and we put a stake in at the northeast corner.

Now it gets easier. We pulled a string from the established northeast corner to the west line so that it barely touched the stake at 12'. This allowed us a very good estimate of the northwest corner. Next we measured over 21' from both northern corners on our string lines to establish the two southern corners.

Our last step was to measure the diagonals which should be congruent. We ended up about an inch off so we double checked our overall dimensions and found one stake was leaning in so it was not quite 21'. We straightened it and our diagonals were within 1/2".

The next day we measured over 2' 6" from all four sides of our square and pulled lines to find their intersections which gave us the four corners of our outer square. I really do not think that this problem was solvable by my 8th grade class but I wish I would have taken the time to walk them all through it.I think it was a great opportunity to show my students that math does apply to real problems in blue-collar jobs not just at universities or in a lab somewhere.

PS If I was doing it over I would have just "picked" center point on the east line pulled off the building where it touched the circle. Then I could have measured 10' 6" both ways and established both of the east corners and used Pythagorean theorem to find perpendicular lines off from both corners. It would have been much easier :)

Construct a square

My landscaping class has been full of interesting math. So I thought I would try my hand at a version of WCYDWT We created this outside garden space last year:

Unfortunately over the summer some vandalism left this:

So this year's landscaping class had the task of re-designing in Google Sketchup with the following goals/restrictions:

• Design a concrete path using a maximum of 2 cubic yards of concrete
• The thickness is 3"
• All of the broken and whole tiles need to be embedded into it.
• Width must be a minimum of 2' 6"

This open ended problem using a new tool (Sketchup) was very challenging for my 8th graders. We went outside, measured, and sketched the dimensions on graph paper. We then drew the school and existing landmarks in 2D using the tape measure too in Sketchup to make our model exact. Then the students drew their ideas for creating a new space. Their first attempts were much too large. We spent the next day figuring out the maximum square footage for two cubic yards of concrete (I did not plan this out well enough and I ended up doing most of the work-too helpful). Then they re-drew. I then tried to get the students to find an approximate area of their designs by breaking them into estimated rectangles (Again I should have planned better and been more clear in my expectations). This was the winning design:

(Not my favorite, others were a bit more creative/artistic, but I wanted to give the students the right to pick)

The next day we went outside to stake it out. So how would you "construct" a square that is parallel to the building around an inscribed circle with a diameter of 21' ? Remember you are not drawing it, but actually staking out the four corners. Give me your solution and is this problem accessible to the average 8th grader?

My solution in the next post.

Spoiler alert: I was way too "helpful." Unfortunately that is a theme of this project but that does not mean you can not learn from it. In my defense I had a different half of my class for multiple days due to the non-stop pullouts for Earth Day movie, Relay for Life, a trip to Michigan State University, students planting trees, chicken pox, suspensions, etc. and I need to get to the digging and building phase before we run out of days in the school year.

Warning: The grade you have received may not reflect your actual level of learning in this class.

As some of you know this is my first year teaching math. I am currently teaching one section of 6th grade math. The rest of my assignment is 6th, 7th, and 8th grade technology which I have taught for six years. This new math class is the source of my focus on grades and grading. In my district we have standards-based report cards and in math we have district tests for our required assessments. For this post I will focus on my technology class and assessment (I will save math for the next post).

My Technology class flies under the radar. We have standards that reflect what the class was like five years ago but not what it is today. I and my fellow middle school technology teachers use project-based learning and computers to challenge kids with fun and relevant learning. I truly have more freedom than almost any other teacher in my district to teach whatever I want however I want. I am accountable to my principals who are happy to see children "doing" creative things. We build pop bottle rockets, balsa towers, hot air balloons, pneumatic devices, and egg drop vehicles. We use Lego Robotics and some math software games. Starting last year students blogged and use Google Docs. This year we are using programs such as Google Sketchup, Pivot, and Scratch.

I grade of course in Technology because I have to but my grades are either a rubric of checklists or once in a while based on reaching certain levels. So many of my grades reflect effort of students to complete the projects rather than measure learning. I am ok with that I guess.

For example some excellent students attempted some unique balsa tower designs (the picture is one of them) that totally failed when tested. By the way, most of the class voted their towers to be the strongest before we broke them. They did not receive an A but I would argue that they learned and taught the rest of the class more about good design that anyone else. Why, because they took a creative risk and tried something the rest of the class was unwilling to do. We do not have time or $ for materials to have students build multiple towers to improve their designs which would be the best way to show their level of learning.

Even more difficult for me was when my students made their own Pivots, Sketchup, and Scratch program. We created rubrics together as a class and then I made a grading form in Google that the students embedded on their blogs.

How does one grade creativity? What makes my opinion more valid than anyone else's?

Therefore I was just going to count the students' assessments of each other. This did not work out as planned as too many of them did not grade each others' projects because some were completed late and some did not take the rating seriously. Basically I question the whole point of this grading as a waste of my time.

My ideal system would be to share these tools and projects with students and have them complete them as creatively as possible to the best of their ability. Their "reward" would be the learning that they experienced as a class. Would they all learn the same things or even the same amount? No, just like now they would learn based on the amount of thought and effort they put into their work. If they slacked off then they would learn less; if they worked hard then they would learn more.

I really don't know how I can accurately measure their actual learning anyway. Grading feels like a game to me and some of the greatest projects like this and this happened for no grade or extra credit. I fail to see how the "grades" that I assign to them contribute to their learning experience and oftentimes do not adequately reflect their actual learning. I also know that grades do not motivate my at risk kids at all, and they motivate the "top" students just to perform for me not to actually learn.

The ultimate thing that matters to me is that students are challenged, given a chance to be creative, and explore in a hands-on way math, science, and technology. The rewards are internal for the students who give their best. Those who just go through the motions miss out no matter what their report card says.

Next post I will explain the conflict I feel comparing this class and grading to my math class.