Some background: I teach reading. Reading and Language Arts take turns reading a novel so that the kids are not swamped with reading too many novels at once. This year Reading gets the first half of each quarter, while LA gets the second half. I hate having the first half because in the first quarter there are so many things we need to accomplish in the first week or so of school, that I don’t get to start the novel right away. That makes me feel rushed to finish the novel by midterm. I never actually do and I’m very lucky that my LA partner teacher and I work very well together and coordinate our book reading well.

So back to today. I actually skipped the whole second part of the book – well not skipped, but we didn’t discuss it deeply and we didn’t test on it. I did have the kids do a Who, What, Where, When, Why summary worksheet in groups and then I took those sheets and summarized Part 2 for them. It actually worked quite well. I was determined to finish the book this week (2 weeks after midterm). Originally I scheduled a test for Friday, then some school wide testing was thrown in for Thursday. So I changed it to a Final Project. The students have to complete a Story Plot Diagram, a Problem/Solution Graphic Organizer and a worksheet that I made where they have to analyze setting, symbols and quotes from the book. I spent yesterday and today reviewing and discussing Part 3. And wow! The kids blew me away – they were making connections from things that happened at the beginning of the book to the end of the book. I had to guide them somewhat, but after I showed one connection, they made more. They saw the pieces of the puzzle fit together. They got why the author showed us some things. At least the kids who actually finished the book did, but it was some of the most unlikely kids who were contributing some of the best ideas!

The project is due on Friday – I hope I have as much pleasure reading their work as I did discussing the book with them today!

Now on to my post……..

Lately my 8th graders have been really bad – well just a few of them – but they ruin it for everyone. With four weeks let in the school year I have decided that I was not going to fight them any longer. So I created a unit on Technology Careers that will keep them busy for the rest of the school year. They have something due each week and they have class time to work on it. On Thursday, they just wouldn’t stop talking while doing their typing (15 mins of silent typing at the beginning of each class) It took them 40 mins to all stop talking for any length of time. That left them 20 mins to work on their project. The first part is due at the end of class Monday (Friday was the 8th grade field trip so I gave them Monday for a due date). The biggest complainers were the kids who were talking! They seemed to think it was MY fault that they couldn’t work on their projects and when I pointed that out to them, they thought it was the funniest thing – that OF COURSE it was MY fault….sigh. Well, needless to say – I was very happy that I didn’t have to see them on Friday.

But I did see them tonight. Tonight was the 8th Grade Formal. Boy those kids clean up well! And they were so well behaved! I walked into the room at one point near the beginning and realized that there were no adults in the room except for the DJ. And do you know what those kids were doing? Sitting at tables or quietly talking in nice groups! They were being good! Overall, tonight was a really good night and the kids had a great time!

Damn I love those kids……sigh

I’m reading through 1st period’s answers and I’m pretty impressed. We did discuss the answers briefly after the movie, but I didn’t feed them any answers. I just clarified some things for them.

This whole experience is really opening my eyes to the idea that we get what we expect. Not that that is a new idea – I know that teacher expectations greatly impact student achievement. I even just read an article yesterday about a study that showed that students who were praised for their hard work put forth more effort and challenged themselves more than students who were praised for their intelligence (if I can locate that article again, I’ll link it here). My students keep telling me that Anthem is hard, and I keep telling them that I know it is, but that I wouldn’t give it to them unless I thought that they could handle it.

My kids are making really good connections about the conflict in Animal Farm and the theme of Collectivism vs. Individualism that we’re discussing with Anthem. They need help with their writing, but we’re working on that too

It’s days like this that really make me feel like I’m reaching the kids

During first period the blogs were not working well. Again, some kids could post and others couldn’t. I noticed a lot of extra HTML stuff when they copied and pasted from Word, so I was having the kids remove the tags. That took forever and most of them did not manage to get a lot done. Towards the end of that class I remembered a site that Stumble took em too recently – writetomyblog.com. I had the kids check to see if they could access it since we have just about everything blocked, and it was blocked. Even though we start out with just about everything blocked, we can ask for sites to be unblocked and 99% of the time they are unblocked for us. I emailed the IT guy and by third period he had unblocked the site for me

During third period though, we kept getting errors and I never figured out what the problem was during that period. I kept thinking about it, though and I realized that I was able to publish from writetomyblog when I typed straight into the blog, and the errors were happening when we copied and pasted from Word. 

At the start of fifth period I tested my theory about the copying and pasting and I was right. We can copy and paste from other web pages, though – the kids could copy and paste the questions that needed to be answered from my blog to writetomyblog.

What I like about writemyblog is that there is NO registration needed! You jsut go to the site, type what you want and publish it to your blog. The best features are that you can spell check your post and add tables. It also has the capabilities to change fonts and sizes and colors, but not all blogs support that.  There are many other things that writetomyblog can do, but I love the basic things the best. As a matter of fact – this post was published from there!

Wahoo!

I took a look just now at what some of them posted and used the comments feature to leave them feedback. Most of the feedback at the moment was to check their spelling and grammar and to make that their information related to the History of Computers.

Also, since the wiki is accessible from anywhere, I told two students who are suspended on Tuesday that their make-up work is to work on their topic at home

To follow up on those posts I decided to use PBwiki for the classwiki. I have decided that I will give the students the password and set up strict guidelines for what they can and cannot edit. I don’t want to pay the premium price for advanced tools until I see how well it works for me and my classes. As with anything new, actual use will let me know what adjustments I need to make.

The 8th grade class went better today, too. Yesterday I had them post reflections on this past school year. Today I had them write a book review like I had the 7th graders doing. The kids were pulling me all sorts of ways during class and I was getting aggravated, but at the end of class as I was summing up the class for them, I realized that every one of them had been actively engaged in their writing and the reason they were all clamoring for my attention at once was because they all wanted me to see what they had written. I have the blog set so that I have to approve of each comment before it is published. I was pulling up finished comments and editing them with each student. It was also showing on the overhead screen. After a few students saw what I was doing, the “Read mine next” appeals started. While it was hectic at the time, I realize now that good learning was going on.