World over students are the same –they love to eat good food but have little access to it. Given their hectic schedules, eating a proper meal becomes something of a rarity. Microwave meals and canned food is common but students do get sick and tired of it if they have to eat it day in and day out. Hence, looking for cheap and nutritious meals becomes much more than a mere pastime.
Graphic designer, Maya Eilam posted an incredible infographic on Kurt Vonnegut's theories of archetypal stories. I'm using it in my classroom to teach students how to structure the one-act play they're writing. First, we discuss the different forms.
Then, I ask students to think of their favorite stories and consider where they fit in this model. Finally, I have them fill out a form like this. Give it a try yourself, and see what submissions other readers have submitted here.
Until this week, I've been using three different tools to supplement my professional learning community: Twitter, Google Groups, and a discussion board hosted my the National Association of Independent Schools. I'm sure I'll use these for the foreseeable future, but I think the landscape is going to change significantly with the launch of Google+ Communities. Google Groups and other online discussion boards have been around for decades and are certainly functional. But they've been around for decades and feel slow. The Twitter PLCs I belong to gather around hashtags. For example, once a month we meet on twitter using the hashtag #geniushour to discuss our 20% projects. 20% Time = Genius Hour. The problem with these hashtag meetups is that all of my followers who are not remotely interested in 20% time, or teaching for that matter, get flooded with completely irrelevant tweets. Google+ solves this problem because conversations can rally around specific topics. See how it works here.
Join these communities here. They're small right now, but I think they have a lot of potential.
Kevin Brookhouser. Teacher, Trainer, Technologyer. I have been teaching English and history for over fifteen years beginning as a graduate fellow teaching world literature and creative writing at Lynchburg College. After earning my M.Ed., I moved to Crested Butte, Colorado to instruct snowboarding in the mornings and English and history in the afternoons at a ski academy for aspiring Olympians. From there, I moved to San Francisco to float on the dot-com bubble, working in the marketing department of an online auction company until the call back to teach rang too loudly, at which time I moved to Squaw Valley to teach in the classroom and on the snow once again. In 2002 my new bride and I moved to her hometown, Monterey County, to pursue my teaching career at York School and her career at the SPCA for Monterey County.
I currently teach the sophomore English class at York, which is a blend of a traditional English class with a significant portion of new media studies. Shakespeare is definitely on the agenda, but so is podcasting, filmmaking, and audience building. I use technology as a central component in all of my classes.
My latest creation is grmr.me, a resource for writing teachers and students, which highlights the most common writing errors with videos on how to identify and fix the errors. Students can then quiz themselves, and once they have completed the quizzes successfully, they earn a badge.
Over the weekend I launched the new and improved grmr.me, a site that allows English teachers to flip their grammar instruction. Rather than marking papers with common writing errors, teachers can now give them a link to a page that has a video that teaches students to identify and resolve the error. Students may also take a short quiz on the topic to earn a badge. The site will continue to grow throughout the year.
Irony is one of the more difficult concepts to teach when discussing literature. For years I've been using Macbeth to teach dramatic irony. This year I decided to flip this instruction by creating a video. I present Dramatic Irony in Macbeth. I send my students to this link, which has an interactive quiz.
If your students use a shared computer, encourage them to use Incognito Mode in Chrome, especially when signing in to Google Apps. In an Incognito Window, users simply need to close the window to sign out of the account. A side benefit--cool secret agent in the top right corner. [File > New Incognito Window]
According to the Center for Disease Control, rates of ADHD diagnosis increased an average of 3% per year from 1997 to 2006 and an average of 5.5% per year from 2003 to 2007. How can we as educators combat shrinking attention spans? Easy. We train them.
Google Engineer turned Mindfulness expert, Chade-Meng Tan outlines an extremely persuasive argument that attention is trainable in his book Search Inside Yourself, The Unexpected Path to Achieving Success, Happiness (and World Peace). The simple act of sitting quietly for a brief period of time and paying attention to attention dramatically increases focus.
Based on his research, I have my students spend 60 seconds at the beginning of each period in silence. I ask them to simply pay attention to their breath, and if a thought comes up in their head, identify the thought, say hello to it, and let it go by focusing back on the breath. I assign one student a bell and she rings it to begin the practice and then rings it again after one minute.
When I started this practice, I thought my always-connected students would protest. I asked them to simply try it for a month and I would check in to see if they found it worthwhile. Here are some of their responses.
I love this practice, and I look forward to it everyday. It is such a great time to think or not to think at all in this world where we are going so fast and always to the next destination and just being stressed. In that one minute, I can really take in the great benefits from just being relaxed and calm.
It's the one time in the day where I can just sit and feel the calm of meditation. It helps me focus in class.
This time before class is irreplaceable as it can calm me down from anything I was doing before class, or sometimes even help me to feel less tired going into class, creating a better learning environment for me.
It gives me a moment to kind of get my mind ready for class. What I mean by this is I stop thinking about everything that came before the 60 seconds and lets me "start fresh" to receive new knowledge.
Each October at York, we host a day where students bring their grandparents and family friends to school. For almost ten years on this day, I have been having my students take part in Story Corps, a national program where people record interviews of friends and family. Students get the questions by going through the Story Corps Question Generator. I purposely do not record video of the interviews because I believe people are more willing to express themselves without a video camera pointed at them. So I record the interviews with GarageBand, edit the audio with still photos using Camtasia, and upload the full interviews as an unlisted videos in YouTube. Students can archive these recordings and pass them down to their own children and grandchildren. This might be my single favorite thing we do in my classroom.
I am beginning a series of videos about writing called Writing Felonies. In these videos, I will cover some of the most egregious writing crimes and show how to avoid them or fix them. My first one is about comma splices.
I'm looking for feedback. I'm applying for the Next Edu Guru on Youtube. Take a look some of my videos here. If you like what you see click the like button. If you don't like it click the dislike button. If you want to see more click the subscribe button.
If you use Google Calendars and use an iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch, you may want to access these calendars in your device's Calendar app. Here are Google's instructions, but if you want to see the process yourself, you can watch this video.
A recent article in Business Insider has many people on the internet justifiably concerned. In essence, if you're logged into Facebook, Facebook is collecting your browsing data. To be fair, many web services do this as well, but among all of the corporations who do, Facebook is the one I trust the least. If you don't want Facebook collecting your data, there are two very simple solutions.
This guy is in charge of the company that is watching you. Photo by Elaine Chan and Pricilla Chan released with a Creative Commons License
With Chrome open, click "File" > "New Incognito Window."
Log in to Facebook.
Keeping Facebook in a separate incognito window isolates it and prevents Facebook apps, cookies, and other tracking tools from seeing your other browsing data. Save time by learning the keyboard shortcut to opening a new incognito window.
I want to be able to see what it’s like not to hear or say anything and still be able to communicate with everyone. I would also like to share what that’s like with my friends and classmates. I want to know what the challenges are and how people who are deaf take on those challenges on a daily basis.
Thus begins Reinel's 20% project proposal. Her plan is to spend a week wearing a headset that emits white noise so that she will be effectively deaf. She plans to create a short film that will document the experience and help spread awareness of the hearing impaired community. You can follow her progress at her 20% Project Blog at http://makinigatmaintindihan.blogspot.com/. Please leave an encouraging comment!
What is makinigatmaintindihan you ask? So did I. Then she showed this supposed Google Certified Teacher the Google Translate page.
Here's a taste of how her week will look ... and sound.
In my last post, I explained how I use quizlet.com to generate flashcards that randomly choose student names. In this video I explain how to use the Quizlet app on iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad to display those cards. I also demonstrate the Android app, Flashcards+ that can download your sets from the quizlet site. Yes, I know I have too many mobile devices.
Two of the most frequently confused words in the academic English classroom are tone and mood. For fifteen years, I have been been explaining this difference to my students. Now with the flipped instruction model, I can refer them to this video for homework, and in class we can work on identifying the difference in various passages.
I have at least seven Google accounts. I have a personal account, a school account, an old school account, an official Brookhouser trainer account, an account I use for the school's YouTube channel, an account I use when I volunteer for the SPCA for Monterey County, and a few that were created for me when I was training others in their own domains.
I only use three of them on a daily basis: personal, school, and school's YouTube channel, but I do use them daily. My workflow had been Chrome for personal, Firefox for school, and Safari for YouTube. That way I could stay signed in without logging in and logging out over and over again. Yes, Google does allow multiple sign-ins in a single browser, but I don't recommend it.
Then on the Google Educast, Sean Williams, Chris Betcher, and Diane Main taught me to create "multiple instances" in Chrome. See the clip here. Since I followed their instructions, the entire way I interact with Google has changed and become more efficient.
Now when I am using my personal account, I see a frightening faceless orange avatar in the corner of my screen. It would be less scary if he weren't so shiny.
And when I'm using my York account, the face is York red.
Still scary, but easily identifiable, I guess. They remind me of this guy.
Here is a video I made for my colleagues that shows how to manage multiple Google accounts using Chrome.
I wish I could take credit for coming up with the idea behind The 20% Project. In truth I got the idea from reading Daniel Pink's Drive, and he got the idea from reading the latest psychological studies about motivation and visiting innovative businesses like Google.
Well at least it came from the greatest minds collaborating on how to transform education in the 21st century, right? Nope. Actually The 20% Project was her idea.
No, that's not a hoodie. This is Maria Montessori, the Italian physician and educator who founded a movement in education that suggests that students should learn by following their interests and interacting with their physical world. The teacher is there to provide order and structure. From The American Montessori Society:
The teacher, child, and environment create a learning triangle. The classroom is prepared by the teacher to encourage independence, freedom within limits, and a sense of order. The child, through individual choice, makes use of what the environment offers to develop himself, interacting with the teacher when support and/or guidance is needed.
Sound familiar? This model of education has been proven effective in elementary and middle schools around the United States. If my students who come to me from Montessori schools are a reliable indication, these schools do an amazing job fostering creativity, innovation, and academic independence. They're sometimes surprised when I actually require that they read a specific homework assignment, but they usually humor me.
The Montessori model hasn't penetrated high schools as much as it has the younger grades, but I am seeing a tide rising of teachers, administrators, students, parents, and business leaders, demanding that we deliberately teach innovation, creativity, collaboration, and entrepreneurialism and give students the chance to learn by making things. That's the Montessori way, and that's what I'm hoping to accomplish with The 20% Project.
Then, I ask students to think of their favorite stories and consider where they fit in this model. Finally, I have them fill out a form like this. Give it a try yourself, and see what submissions other readers have submitted here.
