always learning

The joy of international teaching continues – we are off to Vietnam on another adventure!

Enjoy your holiday, wherever you are

Image from: http://www.vietnam-hotel.net/images/photos/title/vietnam.jpg

I have taught web design for 7 years now, and every year it gets easier – for me and for the students. The more practice I get with teaching them, the easier it is for me to see exactly what they need, and when. I love the feeling of making a new technology tool accessible to all students by consistently improving my teaching based on their feedback. But something even more interesting happened this year…

All of our middle school students now have their own blogs. We have set them up through integrated units in social studies and English over the course of the semester. As we all know, maintaining a blog is much easier than designing a website from scratch, even if you are using the design view in a software application like Macromedia Dreamweaver. But, I have seen something change in our students this year. Usually they are intimidated by Dreamweaver, and struggle with setting up a functioning page, even sometimes struggling with the concept of linking (even though they do it every day when they navigate the web). This year, though, things were different.

As soon as I explained the concept to my 6th, 7th and 8th graders, the ideas started percolating. The designs for a masthead, the organization of the page, the external pages to link to, etc. Before we even started creating their electronic portfolios, they had a vision in their heads of what they wanted. They were ready to tackle the challenges of Dreamweaver because they already had the basics of linking, inserting and aligning images, and organizing pages and links from their blogging experience. And that blogging experience was so smooth and easy to understand that they felt much more comfortable building on those skills to design their own website.

The transformation of our students in such a short period of time just boggles my mind. Since I have arrived in Malaysia, I have found that our students on the whole are a bit weaker in terms of technology than my students in Munich, and I have been working to increase their confidence each year. This year, with the integration of technology into the core curriculum, and the use of exciting new web 2.0 tools has shot us forward by several years.

The electronic portfolios the middle school students have been able to produce this year are outstanding. Many of them have designed their own mastheads and created buttons and thumbnails with Photoshop, and they have all inserted Flash animations and QuickTime files directly into the page, and utilized good web design skills to make their pages easy to read and understand. I can see clearly that this transition has come from their increased comfort level with these skills, through the use of IT in the core classes.

As I explained to my sixth graders yesterday, my goal as a technology teacher is to help increase each student’s level of confidence with technology. I want my students to be able to sit down in front of any computer, Mac or PC, Linux or Windows, or whatever comes next, and feel like they can accomplish their goals – even if it involves using an application or tool they’ve never seen before. I know first hand what it feels like to be faced with new technology every day, and that feeling of satisfaction and success when you have accomplished your task with a new tool under your belt.

Image 1 from: http://www.actacenter.com/IMG/jpg/dreamweaver.jpg
Image 2 from: http://www.nof-club.de/toto/fairnews/thumbs/photoshop_icon.jpg

No, not the holiday season, the recruitment season!

Every year around this time, international school teachers start to think about what they might like to do next August.

Right now teachers all around the world are deciding if they will stay another year, or move on to a new school. They are looking at employment vacancies around the world and imagining what life might be like in Doha, or Hanoi, or Beijing, or Buenos Aires.

Several of my friends have already accepted positions in new schools and I could not be more excited for them. I love the idea that we have the amazing opportunity to continue to do the job we love anywhere in the world. Could there be a better career?

It does make me wonder though – who else is blogging in the international school circuit? I love reading about Jeff’s adventures in Shanghai, Julie’s successes in Dhaka, Susan’s experiences in Singapore, I even discovered John Merrit’s Head of School blog from Krakow (not yet listed on Scott’s 100 Principals wiki), and Andrew Torris‘ Principal blog from Shanghai (listed on the wiki, along with several others I will start reading) and I’m ready for more!

What are international school teachers and administrators thinking about? Do you know of any international school teacher blogs? Are you an international school teacher? Leave a comment and share your blog!

Image 1 from:

http://www.mobile-review.com/articles/2002/image/plane/airplane.jpg

Image 2 from:

http://www.thesavvytraveller.com/agraphics/tools/interarts/world_map_desk_pad.jpg

First the sixth graders started blogging for Ms. N’s social studies class, then they learned how to use wikis for Ms. G’s science class, then the eighth grade English teacher (Mr. R) saw the potential of blogging and got the eighth graders started, then the enthusiasm of Mr. R caught on in seventh grade, so now they are blogging about current events in Ms. N and Ms. S’s classes. Now our students are sharing personal stories, poems, and ideas without prompting, they are creating their own personal academic wikis, and contributing to other online resources. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

I thought I would share a recent e-mail from our grade 8 English teacher, Mr. R, who just started blogging. Mr. R sent this e-mail to all middle/high school staff just a few days after he started blogging with his students:

Well MS/HS teachers it was only a matter of time that the enthusiasm and passion for technology lept from the IT department and began to spread across the curriculum. I am sure it is because I am a computer geek at heart, or maybe it is because IT integration is one of the main components of the WASC action plan, but I have jumped on board the IT ship full speed.

Besides the Newspaper, I have helped all my 8th grade students create blogs. With Ms.C’s help, every eighth grader now has a blog and can maneuver at the most basic level. They can post text, a link, and an image. This only took us one period! I hope to work with her further to really tap the full potential of this technology, but for now, I am sharing this information with you because at least for now all the 8th graders, and from what I am told the 6th graders have blogs.

So what does this mean to you as a MS or HS teacher? There is no reason why their blogs should only be for one subject. This is the way Ms. C, Mr. S and I have envisioned this project: All of these blogs will simply be a place where students can gather, collect, categorizes, and share their writing, whether it is an English, poem, Social Studies research or discussion questions, or a math reflection post. They can label each post as necessary and have everything they write at school, open and accessible to be read by the entire community , they can take all of their work with them to anywhere on the globe.

Ultimately, I could go and read a student’s math reflection, while the math teacher could comment on the same student’s poem. I understand the need we writers have to be read, and there is no better place than the blog to allow students to begin to understand the concept of audience. Too many times only the specific subject teacher is the person who reads any given assignment, but this way, each student can share their work with peers, teachers, administrators, parents, students in other grades etc… It only takes one teacher per grade level to set up their students with blogs, then all the other teachers can simply have the students post work on an existing blog. Ideally a student would create a blog in 6th grade and maintain it until they graduate.

So what I am trying to say in my typical longwinded fashion, is that these blogs are up and running for the 8th grade! If you were to tell an 8th grader to write something and post it on their blog and categorize it as “Math” or “Science” or “Art” They could do it. I am sure Ms. C could show you how to set up your own blog to run the show. It is that easy!

Please take the time to snoop around. Keep in mind this has been up for only two days, so there is still much work to do. But look on the right hand side and explore the pages I have created about the ESLRs, my English Standards, Why We Blog etc…to get a better idea of the power this technology can give the students and teachers. I am going to be sending this email out to all the parents in my grade as well, so hopefully they too can begin to be a part of our learning community, by not only reading their own child’s work (which they seldom do) but they can also comment on it, and they can read to see what other students are doing as well. So they can have an idea of why maybe Johnny only got a B. They will have other work to compare it to.

I have also created the All-Star Writing Club, to showcase some of the best work on any given assignment. Here is a link for my first reflective journal post. If you teach any of these students, please take the time to read their work and make a few comments. I think they will really appreciate your time and comments.

So please stay tuned, and follow your students through the year and see what they are doing, thinking, feeling, saying, writing across the curriculum. Or for now at least in English!

Mr. R

Talk about enthusiastic! I am so impressed with the way Mr. R has motivated and enthused his students to share their writing. I can see the excitement buzzing around the 8th graders already. It’s not enough just to have a teacher start a blogging project, it’s the enthusiasm and energy and excitement of that teacher that motivates the students.

My favorite part: “Too many times only the specific subject teacher is the person who reads any given assignment, but this way, each student can share their work with peers, teachers, administrators, parents, students in other grades etc…” This is exactly what we are trying to accomplish – a community of learners no longer limited by our classroom walls. Rock on Mr. R!

I just discovered a nifty tool called coComment today thanks to Karyn’s blog.

Basically, coComment keeps track of all your online conversations for you. Every time you post a comment on a blog, coComment records your comment and then tracks all following comments to that post. All of your “conversations” are listed on one page. Wow, imagine that! One page where you can check up on all the different conversations you know you started but can’t seem to remember where. I love it!

Image from: http://www.seancoon.org/wp-content/postimages/cocomment.gif

In addition to middle school IT integration, I also teach discrete IT exploratory classes for all middle school students. These exploratories run for 9 weeks (1 quarter), and are intended to expose students to new ideas in a fun and relaxed way. Due to the nature of the class, we usually only manage one or two projects following the MYP Technology Design Cycle. I try to make the projects as fun as possible (don’t we all?) and I very rarely give homework. My sixth graders learn how to create movies using iMovie, seventh graders create personal logos in FreeHand, and eighth graders create e-cards using Flash. All classes finish by creating e-portfolios using Dreamweaver. Last year these projects took the entire 9 weeks. Going through the Design Cycle – Investigate, Plan, Create, Evaluate – is such a valuable process, and really helps clarify for the students how to design a successful technology project, but it takes some time.

Even with the time crunch, I knew I had to add a web 2.0 element to my classes this year and I am so happy with how well it turned out (and how little time it took). Just after the students finished creating their movies/logos/e-cards, I showed them my Middle School IT wikispace and gave a (very) short lesson on wikis. Their next project was to create a tutorial wiki on the software application we studied. I used the UbD GRASPS model to design the task, giving the students an authentic goal: an online tutorial, a real audience: first time users of this software anywhere in the world, and a realistic role: software developers at the appropriate company. As a class we developed the pages that needed to be created and decided on: introduction, skills/tools, finished products, tips, glossary and supporting external links. I asked the students to select a group based on their comfort level with the technology and personal interest and we were off! Each class took about 2-3 lessons (a total of 3 – 4.5 hours of class time) to complete their tutorial. Once all the groups were finished with their individual pages, we rotated through so that each group was able to review, revise and perfect every other groups work.

I am so impressed with how well they were able to complete the tutorials, how fast they were able to finish (compared to designing a site from scratch using Dreamweaver) and how much knowledge they were able to demonstrate within the structure of the project. Take a look if you’re interested:

• Grade 6: iMovie
• Grade 7: FreeHand
• Grade 8: Flash

I think the most exciting part for me, though, was the authentic collaboration that using wikis allowed and how easily students were able to focus on the content not the technology. I was genuinely concerned that I would not be able to add a third project into an already jam-packed course, but the simplicity of wikis made everything a breeze! The students were able to grasp the tech skills in about 10 minutes and the rest of the time was spent working, sharing, learning and collaborating. I am so impressed with how focused the students were, how easily they took to the task, and how well they worked together. Groups were set up loosely based on skill and ability level (and personal interest) which really helped keep each student engaged as they worked. Needless to say, this project is my new favorite part of the course!

Image from: http://www.myptechnology.com/sitefiles/DesignCycleQuestions.htm