New Tech Stuff

This weekend, I decided to take a little "me" time. For the first time since school started, I spent my weekend doing exactly what I wanted to do and nothing else. On Saturday, I drug my husband to the organic food market and the Asian grocery store (a new find that I LOVE!!). Then on Sunday, after church, I perused the Internet and checked out two great tools that I have been hearing a lot of buzz about.

The first site is http://www.goanimate.com/. It's an incredible site that allows you to create cartoons using a bank of characters, scenes, music, and props that are all setup for you. All you have to do is point and click. The site also allows you to upload your own photos to use as characters, scenes, etc. I was really amazed at how simple it all was. Below you can see the short cartoon that I created for out NCETA presentation next month. I can see a multitude of ways that you could use this in the classroom. Why have students draw a comic strip when they can create one online with moving characters and music? It may not be interesting to all students, but I definitely see some students loving it.

The second site is http://www.snap.com/. I really haven't figured this one out yet, but I think that the premise is that you can create a scrolling "slide show" of photos to embed in a website and/or blog. This could be useful because sometimes pictures take up so much space and can become visually unattractive. Keep an eye out for a "snapshot" coming to the Lefanim blog.


Posted By: Amanda Spence

Gifts Our Students Give Us

I know it's one day early, but tomorrow is Memoir Monday, a strategy I want to borrow from one of my favorite blogs, Two Writing Teachers. Each Monday, we write a brief memoir and share on our blog. So, I've been meaning to write about the fabulous crab dinner I had with my family in August while we were on vacation. One of my students last year, Tyler, crabs and fishes with his father. His family owns a great vegetable and seafood market down county. Tyler and his family wanted to bless with me a bushel of crabs for working with him last year. I asked if I could wait and get the bushel in August when I knew my family would be at the beach. Not only did Tyler give me a bushel of just caught crabs that morning; he picked out the prettiest, biggest Jimmys I've ever seen. He also hand-delivered them to my home. It is absolutely the BEST gift I've ever received from a student. I just cannot believe the generosity, and I can tell you that whenever I look at these pictures, I'm blessed all over again. After my brother John Murphy and my mom cleaned them, John and his new friend Tricia steamed them for us. John and Tricia demonstrated the best way to get the white chunks of meat out of the legs. My family and friends picked crabs all night long. I think Lee and I were the last two at the table picking and eating. Thank you, Rose Family, for a wonderful gift!

Our Pledge Wall

I forgot to mention that we had a personal pledge for each of our students to sign so that we could celebrate and put them on our "Pledge Wall." This will stay up to remind our GPE students that they have committed to striving for excellence in every step of their GPE journey.

Our First GPE Block

Well, a little more time has passed before I could get here and blog about how our first GPE blok went. 30 minutes was too short but we did make our students aware of the resources. And your idea to have them sign up for one-on-one tutoring sessions on how to use the sources is a good one. Sierra is so excited about how to incorporate pictures into her blog. Her blog is looking fabulous by the way. We need to work with her a little on adding more reflection to her summarization of her poetry in residence experiences.

I heard our juniors really liked the sunglasses we gave them. Mrs. Schultz told me the next day that Blake had his glasses on and told her it was because his "future was looking very bright." Mrs. Rich came down the next day and asked why we had made her look bad since she didn't have graduation project survivor bags to hand out to her kids. Apparently, Morgan showed her bag to Mrs. Rich. So, I know our students were delighted at their treats; they know we're here to support them through this journey.

Each senior received a Survivor Bag with these items:
Sweetarts to help them get through the sweet and bitter moments.
Bubbles because as they blow them, remember to incorporate imagination.
Kush balls to deal with the stress.
Paperclips to help them keep it all together and stay organized.
Rubberbands because they need to practice flexibility.
A stick of gum to help them remember to chew on their ideas.
A string because everyone needs a lifeline.
A mirror to help them to reflect during this experience.
A balloon because at the end of the journey, each person will have soared to new heights.

Each junior received a pair of shades with their names written on the side because their future is looking very bright.

Each student received a card with their new gmail account and password, their Del.icio.us account and their personal blog information as well as our GPE wiki.

Empowering versus Overwhelming

Don't you love it when wisdom comes right out of the mouths of our loved ones? Dave's right. So, let's go with your idea about setting up sessions for tutorials and help. Hey, we can put them on the google calendar that I'm going to figure out this weekend if it kills me. :) That way we can definitely differentiate and spend the time they're going to need one-on-one. Some of the papers on shared drive are good; some, not. I like your idea about contacting other systems and seeing if they would share their papers. How about you e-mail them and see if they're game. I'm wondering how they go about having their students set up their papers in terms of organization and framework. Come to think of it: I was on the senior project listserv last year (the national one) and occassionally got e-mails from that organization. I'll contact them and inquire about mentor texts as well. You're absolutely right about having mentor texts/models that are written by students close in age. It is more meaningful. I'll also post the inquirey on our talkie listserv. Tell Dave that we also have hidden motives/agendas for doing an outstanding job with our kids in this block. :)

I know how easily I can get overwhelmed with technology and the biggest contributing factor to that is not having the TIME to really try it out with one-on-one help. Now, the learning curve for me is a lot bigger than I suspect it will be for our students. But, you're right: we need to keep in mind our goal of empowering students versus overwhelming them. Hey, notice I have added tags to our blog posts? Yes, I think I have the hang of it. Now to figure out the details about google calendar and how to get the photos on my mac onto wikis and blogs not to mention e-mailing them. Remind me to take photos during our gp block this Thursday. I want to be able to put some on the wiki. I'm keeping my camera with me at school. We also need to have someone take our picture so that we can put it on this blog.

posted by Valerie

Example Research Papers

The other day, when I was trying to find the shared drive which has been renamed, I noticed that there are some senior project papers from past years that have been saved as examples. Perhaps we could take a look at these and see what we can find. Also, maybe we could contact some of the other high schools in the area and see if they would be willing to share papers that they have saved. I think that the papers would be more meaningful to our students if the authors were students close to them in age and sharing the similar graduation project experience. As far as the Google scholars goes, I will try to get a wiki up and running this weekend and add this to the numerous sites that we have already discussed.

This weekend, since we have been stuck inside, Dave and I have been talking a lot about how things are going at Currituck. I have also been sharing with him our plans for our GPE students. After I ranted for about fifteen minutes about all of our plans, he looked at me and said "You're going to do all this and only see the students once a month." Although we know that we will see our seniors more than that, I started thinking. Maybe we could set aside some time for them to come in and work on specific tasks. For example, on Wednesdays and Thursdays we could invite them to stay for a brief session about blogs or online bookmarks in the library. I will be in there anyway and could do brief tutorials at their convenience. What do you think? I really want to make sure that all of this technology makes them feel empowered and not overwhelmed.

Posted by Amanda Spence

More Ideas for Graduation Project Experience

GPE! I like it, and you're absolutely correct that we need to help our students see it as an experience in their learning journey. I agree that the pledge wall needs to be tactile to be more accessible and visible. I remember the art teacher created a very colorful and inviting goal chart last year for the couple of seniors she was advising. It charted the progress on all the subgoals of the graduation project. She hung it right outside of her classroom so that everyone passing by could see it. Wonder if we could take that idea and run with it?

I've been remembering one of the highlights from Katie Wood Ray's keynote speech last October at the NCETA Conference in Charlotte, NC. She elaborated on the importance of having mentor texts for students to study as they are writing in different genres. Since research papers are still a "relatively newer" genre for our students, we need to find models of research papers for them to study. The question is where? I have some of the collections from last year's sophomores, but the majority are not anywhere near the length our seniors' papers are required to be. I'd like to have models that highlight organizational and framework possibilities such as pro/con; cause/effect; causal analysis; definition; problem/solution and argument. In truth, most papers will have components of several if not all of these organizations, but I do believe that it's important to have students purposely set their papers up with one of these organizations from the beginning. Otherwise, you end up getting a lot of papers that are more "reports" versus research papers. We need to talk about how to get them to understand RE-search as a dialogue where they enter with a voice and discuss with the experts on selected topics. DeSena has an excellent book on this (see http://www.ncte.org/store/books/126267.htm to order a copy which I highly recommend). Last spring, I participated in NCTE's webinar with DeSena. I believe I still have a copy of the archived webinar I can share. She discussed at length that a way to help students avoid plagiarism is to truly understand the differences between research and reports. Afterall, at its foundation, research is for the purpose of answering (a) question(s). Students need to start with generating questions they are trying to answer.

Ok, so here's the challenge: where do we find outstanding research papers that can serve as model or mentor texts for our students? We need a diversity in terms of subject and reading level. I spent some time perusing some of the sources in google scholar, but so many of them are at a very high level. I'm not sure most will be accessible to our students. By the way, we do need to add google scholar to our list of sites to show students. We should go ahead and start building our wiki for this group. We can add resources to it for our students. Speaking of resources, I found this link for teacher resources: http://www.ncte.org/collections/collegeresearch
Although it's geared toward teaching research in the first two years of college, it does appear to have some benefits for us.

Graduation Project Conversation Continued

Today I was able to set up about ten of our advisees' accounts for delicious and gmail. The entire process took about 45 minutes. I think that it will be well worth the effort. While I was setting everything up, I had a few thoughts about more possibilities:

1. On the students delicious accounts, we could have them place tags for research resources that we have used in the past and we know are credible (e.g. Purdue University's Online Writing Lab).
2. We can have students set up a "?" tag for sources that they are unsure about the credibility of the information.
3. They can look at each others "?" tags and help one another determine source reliability.

One random comment in response to Valerie's post earlier. I think that the pledge wall needs to be tactile. For some reason, I think that it would really help build and maintain a positive spirit around the graduation project experience. There is something powerful about setting a tangible goal that you can see on a daily basis.

Here is another random thought. At the school I was at last year, Northeastern High, the graduation project class is called the "Graduation Project Experience." I always loved that title and think that I am going to adopt it here at Currituck. I love how it emphasizes that this project is not another thing to check off your list before graduation; it is a once in a lifetime opportunity to grow and learn through hands on study.

Great Collaboration

For me, one of the signs of really great collaboration is the positive energy and optimism I feel when walking away from a formal or informal "session." My head swirls with ideas and seeds planted each time we dialogue. Over the years, many collaborative opportunities have crossed my path (well, maybe a few I zestfully ventured off the path to discover and drag back to the main trail:) and I can honestly say each has taught me lessons. Some have been difficult collaborations while others just flowed with little effort. I always look forward to "talking shop" with Amanda.

Our dialgoue this afternoon focused on incorporating technology into our graduation project group. Our school does not have a graduation project class; rather, every student, grade 9-12, has been assigned to a faculty advisor. Monthly, we will have a block of time where all students will report to their advisor and go over senior project information and skills needed. I think our consensus to approach this as a senior project class (even though sadly we are limited to 30 minutes a month in our formally scheduled blocks) will help the students be tremendously successful. We've decided to introduce students to these tools:

• Delicious bookmarking (great way to tag research sources) which will require each student to have an e-mail. Amanda will set up delicious accounts for the students once we help them set up gmail accounts.
• Google documents (which requires them to have google accounts; thus the decision to go with gmail as opposed to gaggle which our school provides)
• Blogs as a 21st century way to "journal" through their journey in graduation project plus this will give them material to incorporate into their presentation that is sophisticated.
• Setting up a wiki for our group so that we can all collaborate and help each other. One of our pages can be a Celebration page to highlight the accomplishments along the way. We'll have to meet on Monday and determine the information we want from students so that we can develop the form they'll fill out.
• Show students how to sign up for turnitin.com so that they can use those tools in that service to help them effectively paraphrase and avoid plagiarism as well as use the peer review function.
  
• Find a spot for our "pledge wall." Maybe we can use dappleboard.com and post it on the wiki. Hmm.
  

I'm sure we'll be adding to our list as we think of more helpful things such as some tools for choosing paper topics, researching and taking notes and developing strong thesis statements. I know that one of the biggest challenges is getting students to actively read informational text and take effective notes. That can be something we focus on next. My mind is moving faster than my fingers can keep up with which is a good thing. I'm energized! I like our plan to take this graduation project into the 21st Century.

posted by Valerie

Perfect Fit

Lefanim, this word reminds me of an old, familiar pair of shoes. The fit is perfect and it provides a comfort that I think will carry us through our blogging adventure. From the beginning there has been an ease and comfort that has come naturally whenever Valerie and I have conversation about literature, life, and our common passion for teaching. My hope is that all of our blog readers will have the opportunity to be a "fly on the wall" and listen to the lively (sometimes chaotic) dialogue that occurs at the point of lefanim, when the wisdom of the past is coupled with youthful vision.

Conceiving the Possibilities in Language

I guess it goes with the territory of being an English teacher, but I love words and all the vivacious possibilities of creating meaning with language. Lefanim is a Hebrew word with two opposite but paradoxical meanings: "Once upon a time," and "To look to the future." As a teacher with nearly 15 years of teaching experience, my goal is to couple the lessons I've learned with the exciting and cutting-edge ideas of new educator Amanda Spence. The lesson of Lefanim is that we must know and honor our past, our roots, if we are to survive and embrace the changes the future brings in education. Together, Amanda and I will reflect and record our thoughts on all the "stuff" that goes into teaching English language arts.