#twittertuesday for Elementary School Students

For the last several years, my co-teacher, +sheila monger and I have been using +Twitter with my fourth and fifth grade students. It provides and authentic writing experience with practice in succinctly capturing a main idea or essence. We encourage their parents to follow us and they work really hard to do their best work for this wider audience. I try to keep an eye on the twittersphere for trending hashtags and use them if applicable to link to current events. For example  On #GSPD we _________________ (global school play day) .I limit them to  ½ 140 or 70 characters...they have to fit it on the paper and I have to be able to read it from across the room.

Logistics

Before the school year starts, I laminate 30 pieces of paper that fit on my back cabinets.  I create a handle for each student using the first few letters of their first and last name. For example Sandra McConnell would be SanMc. I write their handles and glue them to a name tag with an Egg, showing they are a new user on twitter. As the year progresses, some students created new avatars for themselves.

Be sure to start the year with digital citizenship lessons. We rely on +Common Sense Education lessons. We also use the acronym RAMENN with our kids. When posting make sure it's
R - relevant
A - appropriate
M - meaningful
E - edited - and our students added the last two...
N - is it nice?
N - is it necessary?

Each Tuesday I post the prompt and give students time to generate ideas and write. Sometimes the prompts generate a lot of reflection, other times not so much. After most of the tweets are posted to the wall, my tweeter of the week, a classroom job, chooses one to five posts that they want to have represent our class.  They rewrite the prompt in their journal (or take a picture with their iPad) and bring it to my computer to type into our class account in twitter, @mrsmccsclass. Often I will have them include photographs of the students’ tweets to include in the tweet. I have them do it at my computer because I do not want the students to have unrestricted, unsupervised access to twitter.

Although I am not in my classroom this year, our account is still active and you can see what other types of things we post.

General Student Instructions

1. write a draft of the tweet in your journal. Be sure to include a hashtag summarizing or emphasizing your main idea. Proofread.
2. have your post checked by an adult
3. make edits, then with pencil, write your tweet on twitter paper
4. go over letters with a marker (no more than two colors)
5. post in the wall with blue tape at your @handle

Have fun with it! For sample prompts, visit this google doc.

Sir Ken Robinson @CUE 2013

The keynote speaker at CUE 2103 was Sir Ken Robinson.  His presentation was worth the price of admission!  He is such an amazing, inspiring, articulate, intelligent and funny man!  I am really not sure how to even compile my notes, so I am just sharing sound bites (bytes?) along with (my comments). It should be evident which is which.  Feel free to ask me to elaborate.

On earth, over the entirely of human existence, there have been about 100 billion lives. Yet, each life is unique and unrepeatable.  You are at a unique moment in human history.

We feign knowledge we don't have. Dalai Lama - "I don't know"The mark of a great teacher is to say at times, I have no idea, what do you think?

To be born at all is a miracle.  You should never resent growing old.  It's a privilege denied to many. It is a miracle we are here.  It's amazing how little people settle for.

Human talents are like natural resources, they are often buried and need to be drawn out

It is our differences that make us interesting.  We have to cherish our diversity. It is our best hope for sustainability.  Education currently does the exact opposite.  Human beings are naturally creative.

'My own personal Everest'.  Getting his PhD was his "own personal Everest". (I love that idea! what is your Everest?!)

Where you stand now is not governed by where you started out. So what are you going to do with your life?  You don't get your resume with your birth certificate, you control who you become. 

Education has a narrow view...it is focused on what they thought was wrong with you, not what you could do! You should teach the child, not the subject (Monger says he stole her line)

The effect of standards is to narrow the curriculum.  (Amen.) Who says Americans don't get irony? The person who named No Child Left Behind GETS irony. NCLB has had the effect of shrinking the curricula.  We are confusing the symptom of the problem with the causes. Rather than narrowing we need Expansive that celebrates diversity...Organic development and change...

Effect of mimeograph machines on teachers was profound!  (Tee hee - I think you had to be there)

Out of Our Minds:Learning to be Creative. his new book 

10 years ago... No smart phones, social media - perhaps it should be called Asocial media (This made me laugh later that night, +sheila monger  and I were sitting next to each other, (Y) ing each other's facebook posts, rather than just talking to each other). 

We are the largest generation in human history.  There are more people on earth now than anytime in humon history. We don't know if we can make this work. - (I am paraphrasing for sure here) essentially, he said that if everyone on earth would consume what the average person in India consumes, we'd be fine. Yet if we all consumed what the average American does, essentially we'd need 4 more Earths.

Current forms of Education are locked into the previous century. We need a radical personalization.  There are 4 drivers of the need for change in education:

Economic. If people are better educated we think they'll be in a better position to get a better job and be able to be economically independent. I can't tell you much I want my son to be economically independent. 

Cultural.  The world existed before ou got here and will continue.  But the world that is you only exists because you are here.

Social.  

Personal. In the end, education is always personal.  Could not be a greater irony that we are cutting funding to Ed and increasing funding to prisons. In the US, 30% of students don't graduate. In some areas, 60%. 1 in 31 in US in the penal system.  We have to get away from standardizing education to personalizing it - technology is the key.

The Empty Space by Peter Brook     Is about how he set out to transform theater. Before we can ask how, we have to ask what is it? What can we take a way and have it still be theater? An actor in a space and someone watching.  It is the relationship. There is an analogy to Ed ...our job is to facilitate learning.  They'll do it on their own so when we add ourselves into the mix, we have to add value. Facilitate. Enable, inspire, recognize diversity, recognize possibilities inside them.  Too many distractions- unions, building codes, etc that have gotten in the way of education.

Our job is to teach students not subjects.

Recognize learning styles

Broad set of experiences

Individualize schedules. ex. School of one in NY

Kids learn at different rates... Multi age

New technologies are disruptive but give us the means to change education.  By the way, Technology is not technology if it happened before you were born.

Photo by zota via flickr

Death Valley - it is not dead, just dormant.  What happened with extreme rain in spring 2005 was amazing display of wildflowers.  

Seeds of possibility. If conditions are right, life is inevitable.  Fill them with hope and a sense of ambition.  Education has (and still does) define students by what they CAN'T do rather than what they CAN do

Celebrate our creativity along with our students' creativity.  The focus on education should be LEARNING. Nothing should be added unless it contributes to learning.

It takes more resources to block effective Ed than it would to do it right

Tweets about "@sandramc59 @sirkenrobinson"

Substitute teachers and iPads.

A few weeks ago, I met my substitute teacher for the day at my door. I was on site for meetings, but would not be in my classroom. In my plans and in our chat, I told her about how my kids would be using the iPads to work on two different projects that were in progress. She said, "oh we won't be needing those, I have other things planned."

Later that day I saw her and she seemed pleasantly surprised by my students ability to use the devices to meet their learning goals. It seems that despite her 'other plans', my kids knew what they needed to do and use to finish their assignments.

This week I'm out for a whole week for professional development. I have never, ever been away from my class this long and was quite worried about it. I made sure I had a sub who was comfortable with technology. She has been amazed by what the kids can and do accomplish.

It got me thinking about the first sub's initial reluctance to use the devices. I thought it was a generational thing. Although I am over 50, I've found most teachers my age are less likely to be flexible and adaptable to including technologies into their practices. I am an anomaly due to my first career in high tech. ( I really did work for a company that helped invent the Internet.) I realized it wasn't that my first sub was afraid to use the tablets.
It was more that she thought of iPads as a toy, something a sub might use to fill time, like a game of 7-up or a seasonal crossword puzzle. She hadn't thought of them in regards to their educational value. My kids use their iPads to create, collaborate, problem solve, communicate, research, and yes, to play games. But when they play games, it is with a purpose.

Their new favorite game site is SumDog. Sumdog's learning engine adapts its questions to each student's ability helping teachers deliver Common Core State Standards. It is a group of math games that help students learn and practice math concepts. To use the site with ipads, they need ro go through Rover since it has flash animation. I can target the kids activities to concepts we are working on in class. I am also able to gather data on their activities to see which concepts they are struggling with and where they have mastered concepts. they collaborate with each other and strategize how to play the games. They can play against and with each other. Last week we won a city wide contest! I actually had to tell my kids, "stop doing math and go outside to play!"

So yes, they do play games on the iPads, but there is always a learning objective at the heart of the activity.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad