So we had the first full week of school for the first time in it seems like a month here, and the snow and weather have played havoc. While it is nice to have the break on occasion, the shorten days make my short block even shorter and challenging to get stuff done. It did allow me some time to take part in lots of twitter chats and get new ideas for the classroom. I've been intrigued with the idea of gamification in the classroom and how I can bring competition into my room to hopefully push my students engagement and desire to learn. So with the Winter Olympics going on, I thought it'd be a perfect way to integrate this for my 7th graders. My 7th graders have been a chore this year. It's a new content for me, so you add that to what is the usual craziness of 7th grade and it is stressful to say the least some days. So rather than finding some of the traditional and probably boring ways to teach culture, we have a great competitive way to do so now.
The students were first randomly chosen and picked their countries. I could tell that my students aren't really following the games since British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Mexico and Peru were all chosen while Sweden and Finland weren't picked in either class. So we split it up into two weeks, week one is the training. Students had to learn some of the general information about their country along with several different parts of their culture, the country's rivals and how they were doing in Sochi. The students will get a medal for how in depth their information was and can earn bonus medals for explaining why the cultural expressions were so important in their country. I have a PD day on Monday, so we had to move our opening ceremonies back a day. The students also have to make or recreate their countries flag and we'll have them walk in to our arena. I'm hoping the games go over well. They'll have the trivia competition tomorrow, our Opening Ceremonies will be Tuesday and the students will give short presentations about what they learned on Tuesday and Wednesday. I've set up a biathlon for Thursday where the students will have to race and also hit targets (tennis balls at coke bottles) and we'll use our classroom bball hoop for some Pop-a-shot finale. If nothing else, it'll get them out of the classroom for a bit. Hopefully it'll be fun, I'll try to get some good pictures.
My 8th graders continue to impress. We used the www.mission-us.org interactive histories and used the story of Lucy and her journey as a runaway slave. The kids loved it, they loved the story, were furious when they got caught or Lucy messed up, and asked some great questions to Lucy as our ticket out the door. The next day we learned about John Brown, and they again we're interested, asked great questions. Had students leave the room saying "that was cool, we should learn more about guys like him." Glad to know they're liking it and learning a bit too. I also started using Remind101 and it's been really good. I definitely recommend it to anyone.
Alright, back to grad school work and papers. Thanks for reading, I'll have the Olympics results next weekend!
Sunday, February 23, 2014
Saturday, February 8, 2014
I love flubaroo, more genius hour, etc
First, it's been a great day. I wasn't too stoked about getting up with my son at 6:55, but we were able to watch our beloved Liverpool FC thrash (as the English commentators say) the gunners 5-1 and then were able to see our Tar Heels win their sixth straight. Along with that, I was able to participate in my first #satchat and I was not disappointed. There was some great discussion about PLN and I felt that I was able to hear some great points, and make some new connections that I'm excited about as my PLN continues to grow. Unfortunately, my day is ending with daddy daycare, as my wife gets a much needed night out with the girls while I stay home with the twins and do grad school work. And play around with my blog, you'll see I finally figured out how to spruce things up.
Anyway, onto what I wanted to write about, FLUBAROO. It is awesome. I was introduced to this from the folks I follow that were at edcampwi. They showed off the website youpd.org which is a phenomenal resources with tons of tutorials and all kinds of educational stuff. But a couple guys mentioned flubaroo and so I thought I'd check it out as it was mentioned as a cool way to grade work on Google forms. I was already planning on using Google forms this semester, as a better way that I can track student understanding at the end of each week. These are just short little quizzes, formative assessments really so I can see what all I need to go back over before our Common Formative Assessments or unit tests. But grading and going through 6 classes worth each Friday was going to be a nightmare. Thankfully, flubaroo does it for me. You have to download Google Scripts first, and it can be somewhat tedious having to add the flubaroo script each time you want to use. But once it is set up, all you have to do is answer your questions on the form, and when you run the script, it will use your answers as the key and automatically grades it all. You get your data in seconds. It is such a time saver and now I'm able to view this data, sometimes before class is even over. I'm excited about what I'll be able to do with this now going forward, I think I may move the quiz up a day to Thursday so I can use Fridays to help those that need it. Point is, flubaroo is great, I link my Google forms to my webpage and the students can easily access them and I can get them graded rather quickly, so I can focus on other things. Here is the link to flubaroo and it's pretty simple instructions to follow from there.
Week 2 with genius hour was been better. I showed them to Joy Kirr's blog that I mentioned last posting and I think a lot of kids opened their eyes up to what we're trying to do with the time. The next two days, we went to the library for the students to check out books or online resources and on Wednesday they updated me where they were on a Google Form, telling me what they were doing and what, if anything, they needed from me. I was out on Thursday due to our twins 6 month check-up so that was where we stopped things for the week. I'm hoping that this week, we will be able to do a little bit more work, and more importantly, poll the students as to how they will eventually want to share their experiences and start to set that aspect of this up. I'm thinking about potentially getting with other classes through skype or something else so that we can see how other students are using genius hour and if we can learn anything from it and share our ideas as well.
Our debates went really well last week, the kids did way better than I thought, some really got into it, using their best cop voice and everything. A lot were still shy and didn't say much, but I think it'll get better as we do these more often. I also posted pictures of our tweets on the Great Depression. Had some really good ones that I'd share but I need to find a way to black out the students' names. But I was really pleased and the kids again enjoyed this activity too. We're going to try grudgeball on Monday to review for our Common Formative Assessment, and both my 7th and 8th graders are making PSA's on personal finance. They all were excited about the project, and I'm looking forward to hearing about their ideas and scripts Monday and video shoots on Tuesday. Should be a fun week as we will get into Social Change, slavery and the Civil Rights movement, which is always an interesting and great unit for us.
As always, thanks for reading, let me know what you think here or on twitter@amcrowe5
Anyway, onto what I wanted to write about, FLUBAROO. It is awesome. I was introduced to this from the folks I follow that were at edcampwi. They showed off the website youpd.org which is a phenomenal resources with tons of tutorials and all kinds of educational stuff. But a couple guys mentioned flubaroo and so I thought I'd check it out as it was mentioned as a cool way to grade work on Google forms. I was already planning on using Google forms this semester, as a better way that I can track student understanding at the end of each week. These are just short little quizzes, formative assessments really so I can see what all I need to go back over before our Common Formative Assessments or unit tests. But grading and going through 6 classes worth each Friday was going to be a nightmare. Thankfully, flubaroo does it for me. You have to download Google Scripts first, and it can be somewhat tedious having to add the flubaroo script each time you want to use. But once it is set up, all you have to do is answer your questions on the form, and when you run the script, it will use your answers as the key and automatically grades it all. You get your data in seconds. It is such a time saver and now I'm able to view this data, sometimes before class is even over. I'm excited about what I'll be able to do with this now going forward, I think I may move the quiz up a day to Thursday so I can use Fridays to help those that need it. Point is, flubaroo is great, I link my Google forms to my webpage and the students can easily access them and I can get them graded rather quickly, so I can focus on other things. Here is the link to flubaroo and it's pretty simple instructions to follow from there.
Week 2 with genius hour was been better. I showed them to Joy Kirr's blog that I mentioned last posting and I think a lot of kids opened their eyes up to what we're trying to do with the time. The next two days, we went to the library for the students to check out books or online resources and on Wednesday they updated me where they were on a Google Form, telling me what they were doing and what, if anything, they needed from me. I was out on Thursday due to our twins 6 month check-up so that was where we stopped things for the week. I'm hoping that this week, we will be able to do a little bit more work, and more importantly, poll the students as to how they will eventually want to share their experiences and start to set that aspect of this up. I'm thinking about potentially getting with other classes through skype or something else so that we can see how other students are using genius hour and if we can learn anything from it and share our ideas as well.
Our debates went really well last week, the kids did way better than I thought, some really got into it, using their best cop voice and everything. A lot were still shy and didn't say much, but I think it'll get better as we do these more often. I also posted pictures of our tweets on the Great Depression. Had some really good ones that I'd share but I need to find a way to black out the students' names. But I was really pleased and the kids again enjoyed this activity too. We're going to try grudgeball on Monday to review for our Common Formative Assessment, and both my 7th and 8th graders are making PSA's on personal finance. They all were excited about the project, and I'm looking forward to hearing about their ideas and scripts Monday and video shoots on Tuesday. Should be a fun week as we will get into Social Change, slavery and the Civil Rights movement, which is always an interesting and great unit for us.
As always, thanks for reading, let me know what you think here or on twitter
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