Foreign Language Department Meeting

About an hour before the department meeting with Foreign Language, I was in a bit of a panic. The entire network was down. Suddenly, with no reason (and no later explanation since, and I'm writing this about three days after the fact) there was simply no internet.

That was problematic since I was intending to show the teachers some tools and then discuss how they might be used for instructions.

Fortunately, about fifteen minutes before the meeting, the network just as suddenly and mysteriously decided to function again.

The meeting went relatively well. In prep, I had added a page for foreign language to my wiki. I mostly used tools I was already aware of that I felt had foreign language applications. I showed the teachers my wiki, and the list of tools I thought would be of use.

I was hoping to discuss more curriculum and/or standards. But, as is often the case with tech enthused teachers, they were very focused on the tools. Even so, while looking at the various tools, they did talk about HOW they could use them. They talked about how they could replace something less functional that they already used. They talked about specific lessons where these tools would engage students. At first, I was starting these conversations, but by the end of the meeting, I was just sitting back and listening to them.

I think this meeting was a very good start. I showed them voice thread, voki, audacity, and wordle.

Audacity was probably the least favorite, because it looks intimidating. They liked voice thread, but are a little wary of having to pay for the edu version, or of risking students stumbling across inappropriate content or comments. Also, I think trying to use the mouse to annotate images was frustrating for them. Voki was by far the favorite. The teachers were able to quickly figure it out, and saw the potential for having students be very engaged by it. They liked audacity for the idea of having students listen to themselves speaking a foreign language, but liked voki better. Students could still listen to themselves, and re-record as many times as they like. And, students could still share work with one another. But, the interface is more engaging (a talking cat is just better to look at than a big grey box) and less intimidating. The time limit of 60 seconds is also not likely to be an issues. And, as time moves on and the teachers become more comfortable with some technologies, they might be more willing to give audacity another try. I'm of the opinion that in the meantime I should look for something similar that scares people less.

They also had a chance for a better intro to the student laptops. Because they do not have teacher laptops, I decided to bring student laptops to the meeting so that everyone could have a computer. It did make trying to keep everyone on the same page a challenge. One teacher had an exceptionally hard time with the red mouse button. and, the teacher whose room we used wanted to sit at her desk, so it was harder for me to notice if she had missed something.

This was an intro--to the computers, to using technology, and to working with me--and as an intro it went very well. I think that I will have opportunities to collaborate with the foreign language department in the future.

Foreign Language Dept

I finally had a meeting with the non CFF teachers today. I had been unsure if this was going to happen, but, as they are now allowed to use the laptop carts, I strongly felt it was needed.

I wasn't sure what to expect. I had a larger turnout than I'd anticipated. I was on my own--no one from admin or the tech department was able to make the meeting. Still, things went really well. I almost forgot to print a meeting agenda, but I managed to pull one together about fifteen minutes before the meeting, and I had a cart to demonstrate with. I didn't have access to the internet, which meant I wasn't able to show any of the image files I wanted (I couldn't log onto the computer because it was not connected to the network, and I don't have a local logon for the room I was using).

When I took questions at the end of the meeting, I got a lot from the two Foreign Language teachers. Since the work day was over, I eventually thanked everyone for coming and asked the FL teachers if they wanted to stick around and go over some things (I also wanted to lock the laptop cart up before its storage room was locked for the night).

They are very eager to use the laptops. Their first thought was using the laptops to access their online text books. Previously, they had had to have students do this as homework, and even that was not an ideal situation since some students did not have access to the internet. As we talked, we discussed using the laptops with headphones for listening activities. I mentioned the Audacity activity I had done for reading fluency, and they liked the idea of doing something similar. We also talked about having students make and record vokis and use muchobeets flashcards. I hope to also bring up the idea of collaborating or communicating with native speakers. This will be more difficult without student emails, but doable with tools such as blogs, wikis, nings, skype, etc.

One of the teachers I was talking to was the dept. chair. At one point, she said she wanted to share and talk about some of these ideas with other teachers in her department, and I told her that, if she wanted to have a dept. meeting, I would be more than happy to come and talk with them.

I'm glad that, even though foreign language wasn't included in CFF at my school at the beginning, I will have the chance to work with them now. I'm really looking forward to it.

Creek Project--Update One

I'm not going to track the Creek Project on a daily basis. Some days very little if anything happens with it. And some days, something happens, but not enough to prompt a blog entry.

We are closing in on the midway checkpoint. On March 9, 7 days from now, the students will have to turn "evidence" into the Biology teacher. All of them have so far turned in their project sheets--detailing their questions, and their projects.

I have only worked with a few students. I showed one group how to create a voki, or use gizmoz (which tends to work a little better on student computers). I was a little disappointed because the student computers do not all have flash up to date, so neither of these programs were running properly.

I worked with another group to show them how to remove lyrics from an MP3 using Audacity. That way, they will be able to record themselves singing their new lyrics over the music. They plan on working on this from home, though, where they have garage band. Being a PC user at home and school, I'm not as familiar with garage band, and don't know if they will be able to do the same thing. However, I am optimistic. I didn't just show them how to do it. I knew there was a tutorial on youtube, so I did a search, explaining to them what I was searching for and how. After finding the tutorial, I made the students follow it. They had to watch what was happening and read the captions. After a successful run, I made the students repeat the process without the aid of the tutorial. I feel confident that they will remember how to do it in Audacity, and will be able to figure out how to do it in another program.

Today, I touched bases with the Biology teacher again. She is in the process of introducing the project to her non-honors class this week. Yesterday she had them pick a question, and yesterday and today they worked on researching their topic. This way, they are more focused on what the purpose of the project is than on the technology or "product" part of it. Then, once they have gathered their research, she is going to introduce the project. She is still deliberating on how much in class time to give students to work on it. These students do not have a study hall like the honors students, and many of them will not have the ability to work on their projects at home. She has also decided to limit their project choices. They will be able to do a Photo Story, game, poster, or design another project (and get approval). This leaves the students free to be creative with their project design, but it also focuses students who might be overwhelmed with too many choices.

She regrets the order she did things in with the honors classes. Because she introduced the project all at once, a lot of students focused on what they were doing instead of why. Students had decided to do a Photo Story or a web site before deciding what question they were answering. Because of this, the projects might end up not fitting the objectives of the students. One example is a group of students that decided to do a website on fish--but they had no clear idea of what the purpose or function of the website was, or what information would be on it, or how to make it an interesting, engaging site that people would want to visit. I think we both agree, in the future, it would be a good idea to assign students to pick a question before introducing the project. For honors, at least, I still feel that it might be reasonable to have them responsible for doing research while putting together their projects. It would force the students to make intelligent use of their time, and redirect both the project and research based on one another.

Reading Project--Day Six

Today was the due date for all students to have selected an article to read off of the teleprompter.

After finding an article, they have to modify it. They have to include a greeting, a sign off, and change around any words or wording that don't work for a spoken report. I have a few concerns.

Some of the students who finished early didn't want to take the extra time to practice. They will have in class practice time. But, they could have started practicing today. Some did. Others decided it was free "play on the internet time."

I see two possibilities for improving this in the future. 1) Give the students a chance to record and here themselves read this article. Either have the first recording be after finding and modifying an article, or tell students who finish early to record this in Audacity. That way, students could hear this article. They would have a better grasp on words they don't know how to pronounce, or awkward phrasing. 2) Put more of a premium on improvement. If students could use their reflections as a sort of check list, their practice would be more focused than just "read well." It would be "read so that you can work on these three specific things."

Another concern is that students are not even silently reading the articles. Many are. Some are skimming or picking articles with interesting topics. I think that for some, they will not fully read the article until the in class practice day. On the one hand, it will hopefully give them some concept of consequences for slacking. On the other, it will possibly hurt their confidence. I'm expecting some reactions of "this is too hard," or "this is pointless" from some students, not because its too hard, but because they did not take the steps to make it doable.

I came to the conclusion of not reading based on some things I saw. A few students did paste their articles into the teleprompter, making the text large enough for me to read from behind them. Some of the things I saw were phrases in parenthesis that made for awkward sentences, and large, often technical words.

Now that I think of it, some of that does come from a lack of thorough reading. Some of it probably comes form a lack of comprehension. Its not that the students are slacking (not all of them) and not trying to read. It is that they are so focused on reading aloud that they are missing meaning. They don't realize that something sounds awkward because they don't realize how it sounds at all. It is a string of words, and their goal is to get all of the words, not the sentence.

I talked to the Reading teacher about adding a component to the grade that reflected improvement on the specifics that students put in the reflection. She agreed that it was a good idea. However, she commented that most of the reflections are still very vague. They don't have specifics that students could work on. Also, she said that the things that students would need to be working on are often the things that they just don't do--perhaps things that they don't even realize they need to work on.

So, the students, by the sound of it, did not necessarily take full advantage of the reflection assignment. For me, the next thing I want to reflect on, is how to get students to take fuller advantage of that--in this or any other class.

Reading Project--Day Five

Just got back from my last class of the day with the reading project.

Something that struck me very early on, and that the Reading teacher said before we started, and that every teacher knows is true every year, is that the different classes have very different personalities as a group. And, that effects how quickly students work through assignments.

The Reading teacher, being more familiar with the kids, does phrase things differently, and handles distractions differently in each class. I think as a coach, I'm at a disadvantage that disadvantages my teachers. As a teacher, I knew what to expect from classes--not always, but I had a feel for them. I knew when something would need to be presented a little differently, or which student I needed to win over at the beginning to prevent half of the class from declaring a project a failure before giving it a chance.

As a coach, I walk into each new class blind. Certainly b the end of a project, I have a better feel for classes. And, if I do a second or third project with a teacher, I won't have that same initial speed bump.

I would like to, in the future, ask teachers to let me come in and watch and/or interact with a class for a day or two before getting down to the last stages of planning. I think most teachers will understand where I'm coming from. And, if a teacher is already letting me come in to work together on a project, he/she probably won't mind letting me get my feet wet first.

As far as the project today, one of the things we are dealing with is students working at very different paces. Partly this is do to ability level. Because the second part of the project was writing a reflection, some students zipped through it because they did not reflect very seriously. Others went very slowly because they were being more methodical. Some were able to work quickly because of typing skills. Others were held up because they only know the hunt and peck method (although I wonder if speed could have been improved by allowing them to type it all out on a phone with their thumbs.) Some write slowly because it is not a strength. Other write quickly because it is.

Differing speeds are also due to absences and, of course, schedule disruptions. Ideally, I would like to have the ability to allow students to work on this at home. But, students don't have access to email to send files home, and we can't expect every student to bring a jump drive to school. And, we can't expect every student to have access to a computer at home.

I still haven't had time to read any student reflections, so it's still too early to decide if students made use of the first part of the assignment. However, I did have one idea I would like to incorporate if we do this project again. We had students reflect on what areas of their reading need improvement and what they need to do to improve, but we are not specifically evaluating if they improve those areas. I think, in the future, I would like to see some part of the evaluation of the second reading based on their reflections from the first reading.

About half of the students moved on to finding articles to read for the taped, cueprompter reading. Many of them were unsure if reading about a crime was going to be school appropriate. The Reading teacher took it on a case by case basis.

I was also happy to see that, in addition to practice with reading and writing, and reflecting on their skills, some of the students were also gaining exposure to current events. Most of the students were very interested in the articles they selected since we told them to find something that interested them. Several students found current events articles that engaged them.

Reading Project--Day Two

Day one went well. We didn’t get as many students recorded as we would have preferred.

By the end of day two, most of the students had been recorded. A few absent students will have to be recorded later, as well as about three who did not have time to be recorded.

Unfortunately, since I have been mostly supervising students in my room while they recorded, I have not had the opportunity to observe the students listening to themselves and working on their reflections. I hope to have a chance to do so once school begins again. I will have to work with the few students who have yet to record, but I have been told by the Reading teacher that she has not yet had the opportunity to work with the students in Word before, so I will have to be present to make sure everything goes smoothly as far as saving documents, and helping students who are not familiar with 2007.

Again, I hope that the students take advantage of the opportunity they are given for reflection in this activity. After spending a few days with the classes, and the activity, I’m beginning to think that, given the chance to do this or a similar activity again, I would avoid the word reflection with the students. It has a somewhat bad connotation with them—they think it’s a joke and/or don’t really understand what it means. I would keep the directions the same, but I would come up with a different word to replace reflection.

The students are doing well with the technology. A few have had technical difficulties, but most of those are related to students playing with the program before recording themselves and accidently changing the settings. They are also being relatively mature about using it. A few have recorded the teacher while she was giving directions, but most listened to directions and waited to record themselves. Several were very nervous about recording themselves and had to deal with “the giggles” before starting. Quite a few required a countdown to get started. However, I only had one student who was being deliberately disruptive. He was sent back to class where the Reading teacher dealt with him. He was reassigned to the final recording group and, his second time around, was as well behaved as the rest of the students.

The second part of the project is unfortunately becoming a scheduling issue. We had a vague timeline established for it. But, we had two snow days in one week, and will now not see the students until Tuesday of next week (the day we had hoped to begin the video recording). I will have to meet with the Reading teacher and figure out how we want to proceed. I am hopeful that she will not decide to forget the rest of the project because of time. She is very excited about it.

I did have the chance to look through her directions for the rest of the project. She divided the overall project into tasks with due dates: find an article, adapt the article, save the article, practice and record yourself reading the article.

At the moment, she has the students saving the webpage where they had the article posted to the teleprompter. I’m not completely sure that that will work the way she anticipates, and I will have to check on that before meeting with her. I’m also going to recommend that she has all of the students print out their adapted article so that anyone without computer access can practice from the typed article while not having to individually admit that they don’t have internet access.

PodCasting

Received an email this afternoon from an AP teacher interested in creating podcasts of lectures.

That gave me the push I needed to finally figure out how to convert an audacity file into an mp3. That was not nearly as daunting as I had anticipated. The needed file was already installed, so I didn't have to have the tech guy install it. Once I had located the file I was able to export as an mp3.

I then created a gcast account. I know there are other programs out there, but that is the one I am most familiar with, so it is the one I will be using. I found it to be very easy to use.

I now just need to find a time to meet with the teacher to go over how to use audacity and gcast, and to discuss whether to embed the podcast in a wiki or a blog.

Reading Project--Day One

I got into the classroom with the reading project for the first time today. All in all I think things went really well.

As the teacher said, each of her classes has a very different personality.

The project, in my opinion, is really worthwhile. And that is largely because of the reflective element that the reading teacher based it off of.

Yesterday, the students did a pair reading. They listened to one another and gave each other feedback. Based on the feedback, they had to reflect on APE (the things you need to not sound like an ape when you read)--accuracy, pacing, and expression.

She wasn't entirely pleased with their reflections from yesterday. She revisited what directions they had been given and created a writing assignment for today. After the students recorded themselves, they had to listen to themselves at least twice. While listening, they had to read the article and find miscues and errors. Then, taking that information, they had to reflect on APE. She gave students specific directions. For each letter, they had to find two things they did well, two things that need improvement, and two ways they can work on improving them. They have to find specifics from their recordings.

This is of course in preparation for the next project where everyone will hear them read. This way they get a chance to hear themselves and a) realize how important it is to practice and b) figure out what they need to work on.

We didn't get as many kids recorded as I had hoped. However, that was largely do to some house keeping that needed to be taken care of. We'll still be able to finish most if not all of the recordings tomorrow. My biggest worried--the microphones picking up too much background noise from other kids reading--was not a large problem. Its low level buzz, but students can still make themselves out clearly on their own recordings.

I think the teacher is currently pleased with how the project is going. She also said that, especially now that it is started, she's very happy to have a second person.

I am anxious to see how much the students improve between the first round of recordings and the second. In other words, I'm anxious to see if the students are taking advantage of the reflection and learning from the work they do.

An Unexpected Project

I share my "office" with the reading and study skills teacher. She's not a CFF teacher, but I tend to share useful tools and articles with her all the time. And she will often tell me how classes went or what she's working on--thinking aloud while making lesson plans.

Just through conversation, we started talking about what to do after Christmas. She planned on having the students practice reading out loud. I tried to convince her to have them record themselves on audacity so they could hear what they sounded like. She was pretty wary of the logistical issues of trying to pull it off.

And then I found an online teleprompter, cueprompter. She thought it looked really neat, and I saw her typing things into it from time to time. She saw potential for it in her class.

And so we're going to do a project.

She's decided she wants to have the students read from the teleprompter, record themselves, listen to themselves, and look for miscues. I'm very excited.

And this really was a joint effort at creating the project. I got as far as read "something." That isn't nearly good enough. She decided that they are going to pretend to be news reporters--for news, sports, celebrity gossip, or anything they want. That is much more of a hook.

At first she was going to have the kids write their own script, but then decided, since the focus of the project is on reading, and time is an issue, she's going to have the kids look up a script. They do plenty of writing activities in class, so I think not using the writing aspect this year will not be a detriment to the project. Then, if it goes well and she wants to do it next year, she has to option of setting aside extra time so the students can write a script.

She's asked me to find resources for the students based on what type of news they want to do--she'll have them sign up for that in the next few days. I think I am going to suggest having them go to a related news site (e.g kids wanting to do a sports story will find an article on SI.com, kids interested in reporting on celebrity gossip can go to the entertainment section of cnn.com). That way, there is one more step in the reading. Students will have to read through the article and see if it is something they want to read (no one here will pick an article about how the Steelers will be out after the first playoff game) and if it is something they can read (someone doing the project without a partner shouldn't be reading an interview).

She also suggested that if we give the students the recording on a CD, many of them will be proud of their work and maybe even post it to youtube.