Feb

28

What’s your blog’s personality?

Filed Under Blogging in and out of the Classroom, Goals, The Way I See It | Leave a Comment

Know thyself – a maxim as pernicious as it is odious.
A person observing himself would arrest his own development.
Any caterpillar who tried to “know himself” would never become a butterfly.
André Gide (d. 1951), Nouvelles Nourritures

I kind of agree with Gide when he says a person observing himself would arrest her own development and never become what she could be.  I think he may have a point because a  person  could unintentionally limit  herself  because of some mistaken  notion of what  she was and what she could become.  I’ve  see that misguided thinking  in some of my students. They limit themselves because they can’t  see themselves as the butterflies they could become  but only as the caterpillars they are at the moment and act accordingly.

Teachers at Risk hasn’t really tried to know herself.  Over the  2 1/2 +  years of her existence,  she has been  blissfully going with the flow.  But,  today she discovered what type of blog she was -at least according to The Typealyzer.  :) (Thanks for the link,  Sharon) It turns out that Teachers at Risk is

mechanics1

Teachers at Risk also  learned that she has a tendency toward practical, logical yet intuitive thought. That didn’t really surprise her when she thought about it, but she couldn’t help wondering  why her spirituality didn’t  manifest itself  because it does  exist?  She’ll have to think about that for a while.

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Do  you know what kind of blog you are?  Would you be puzzled by some of the results?  Would you have to think about something  for a while, too.  Visit Typealyzer and find out.

Feb

25

It’s not literacy any more; it’s literacies.

Filed Under "At-risk" students, Engaging Assignments and Activities for Students, Learning Strategies, Web 2.0 tools and technologies, motivating students, underachieving students | 1 Comment

literacymoodle4

It’s not literacy any more;  it’s literacies.  In the past, we may have understood  literacy to mean “the quality or state of being literate, esp. the ability to read and write”  But today  literacy is much more than that.

“Literacy is about more than reading and writing – it is about how we communicate in society…[It] takes on many forms: on paper, on the computer screen, on TV, on posters and signs.” (UNESCO -statement for the United Nations, Literacy Decade 2003 – 2012)

Chris Vanellis  in  “Help your teen develop literacy skills“  writes about the multiple literacies that students need to master. These are

• computer literacy (using software)
• web literacy (surfing the internet)
• digital literacy (cells, email, MSN)
• visual literacy (graphics, text, TV)
• auditory literacy (radio, conversing)
• home literacy (routines, chores)
• community literacy (bus schedules)
• social literacy (manners, etiquette)
• work literacy (procedures, routines)
• curriculum literacy (school subjects)

I think we need to help kids see how these multiple literacies are really relevant to their lives not only  in school and beyond but also in their personal lives.    Mastering these litercies can improve the quality of theri lives. Sometimes kids can’t connect the dots for themselves, so we have to help them do it.

All of these literacies involve reading/writing or communicating  in one form or another , so students need to be able to read/write/speak well enough to be able to understand and to be ale to be understood.  They can improve all of these skills on-line or off .

I’ve found that my reluctant/struggling readers are engaged by and yes, even look forward to reading things like

    newspapers, flyers/magazines (on-line and off)
    catalogs
    comic books
    cartoons
    graphic novels
    instructions for building models
    TV guides
    e-mails
    CD/DVD covers
    poems/song lyrics

My reluctant/struggling writers are willing to write things like

    e-mails
    blog posts
    comments to posts
    journals
    letters to friends
    songs/poems/raps
    even paragraphs and essays on-line.

My students who are shy or fear public speaking or even just need to improve their oral skills are more willing to participate when they can use computer applications like VoiceThreads, Voki and Audacity that let them practice and then record what they have to say. They can gain skills and confidence in a low risk setting.

Just to wrap things up here,(I’m getting that feeling I’m starting to go on and on as my cold gets worse and worse) I want to emphasis again that today literacy is not just about the ability to read and write. It’s much more than that. It is true though that the ability to read and write are necessary prerequisites to being able to develop mastery in the other literacies. It’s important for students to see that these literacies are relevant and will help them improve the quality of their lives in and out of school, and if they have trouble seeing or accepting this, we need to help them.

Feb

14

Helping students understand and respect boundaries

Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management, Special Education, The way I see it, motivating students, underachieving students | 22 Comments

fence (Sorry, I don’t have the name of the person who took the photo. It was a creative commons copyright photo. If you know the name of the person please tell me and I’ll post it.)

Some of my students think it’s OK to interact with teachers the same way they interact with their friends or peers. I really don’t exactly know why that is. I’m not a psychologist, but I’m sure there must be some reason. (If you know, I’d really appreciate it if you’d drop me a line and clue me in) These kids get into all kinds of trouble at school because they think this way or more accurately they act upon this misconception. I try to teach my students there are boundaries that exist between students and teachers that need to be respected, and there are things they can do at home that they can’t do in school. This week I was given that opportunity to teach those lessons again.

We’re two weeks into the new semester, and my students are really engaged by our class blog and have taken to it like those proverbial ducks to water. Even the most reluctant readers and writers enjoy being able to contribute to the blog and see their work published.

They’ve had lots of fun choosing and creating avatars to represent themselves. A few students chose avatars inappropriate for the school blog, and those students, after some discussion, got to choose another more appropriate avatar. Those were the same students who when they were creating Vokis to introduce themselves to the others in the class had their Vokis say inappropriate things. Once again, after some discussion, they got to create Vokis more appropriate for the classroom.

Last Thursday, my students were working on an assignment about multiple intelligences. They really liked taking the on-line quiz to determine their own multiple intelligence profile and then seeing the results displayed in a colourful pie chart. (I think this is the best site that I’ve come across for students.) My students wanted to post their results on the class blog so they could compare. No one objected having their results posted. Why? The results showed they were smart in lots of ways, and they needed to hear that. Most of the students in the class have been identified as having learning disablilities. It was wonderful for them to see that they had all these strengths.

We ran out of time in class, and I told my students that I would post their multiple intelligence profiles after school so that we could see them on the blog the next morning. While they were leaving, some of the students were talking about Valentines Day which was on Saturday. I didn’t think anymore about Valentine’s Day until I opened a student’s file to preview it before I posted it and saw that a student had left me a message. (I always preview before a student’s work before it gets posted) The message would have been be most appropriate for a sweet Valentine’s Day card, but not at all appropriate for me, the student’s teacher.

I was stunned by what the student had written. When I finally became “unstunned”, I decided I needed to talk to the student about student/teacher boundaries and what was appropriate and what wasn’t. If the student had been just joking, that wasn’t appropriate. If the student hadn’t been just joking, that wasn’t appropriate either. Either way the message the student wrote to me, a teacher wasn’t appropriate. The student needed to hear this.

I met with the student the next day. and talked about the appropriate boundaries within a student/teacher relationship and that the message the student sent wasn’t appropriate. I told the student it was necessary that we both respect the boundaries that needed to exist between a student and a teacher. I hope the student understood.

Feb

11

TV harms babies brains-that’s pretty scary.

Filed Under "At-risk" students, The way I see it | 5 Comments

tv photo by Aaron Escobar

Everyone wants their kids to be as smart as they can be. That’s only natural. So when we hear about award winning CDs like Baby Eistein or TV programs like Sesame Street claim kids will become smarter if they listen to or watch these CDs or programs of course we’re interested. We all want to help our kids be the best they can be. But, 25 years of research may prove that we’ve been misguided by these claims. We may be doing more harm than good by having our babies and infants listen and watch these CDs and TV programs. That’s pretty scary.

In one of the most extensive reviews of its kind, the Seattle pediatrician (Dr. Dimitri Christakis )  says infant-aimed DVDs such as Baby Einstein, and even award-winning kids’ shows like Sesame Street, can do more harm than good to children under the age of 2.

In fact, the sensory overload of all those colours, sounds and sights – be it Big Bird or Baby Mozart – may be at least partly to blame for the tenfold increase in cases of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the past 20 years. It now affects between 5 and 20 per cent of American children.

Dr Christakis notes that nine out of 10 children under the age of two watch TV regularly. Some of these children spend up to 40 per cent of the daytime in front of the tube.  Children as young as four months old are watching TV now and Dr. Christakis suggests that  watching  too much TV too early is “rewiring”  these infants brains.

That’s pretty scary.

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    These are my personal views and not those of my employer.
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