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May
31
A reasonable way to deal with student text messaging in class
Filed Under Behaviour Management, Web 2.0 tools and technologies, positive climate | 10 Comments
uploaded by kewanjaAlthough cell phones are banned at school and teachers are expected to send kids to the office if they o much as see a student with a cell phone, students are still finding ways to use their cell phones to text message without teachers seeing them do it. Text messaging is difficult to spot. Student can text message on phones hidden in pockets, backpacks, under desks, behind books, ask to go to leave room for some reason, etc. ,etc., etc.
Personally, the problem of students text messaging in my classroom is the least of my problems. Believe me!
The way I look at is that when students text message in class, they’re not disturbing the other kids. Oh I know they’re interrupting their own learning momentarily, but I think it’s better for them to take a minute to deal with their text message and quickly get back to their work than to keep obsessing about ithe message and not focusing on the task at hand. Yes, it would be better if they didn’t have their cell phones in class, but they do.
Students know that they’re not supposed to text message just like they know they’re not supposed to pass notes back and forth that are written on paper. But there will always be students who pass notes back and forth, and there will always be students who text message. That’s just how it is. I have to pick my battles, and to be honest students text messaging in my class is not a battle I want to spend a lot of energy on.
If I happen notice my students text messaging in class while I’m teaching the lesson, I ask them to stop. I don’t want anything distracting students when I’m teaching the lesson. I guess I’ve have the same rule for text messaging that I have for listening to music in the classroom. Students can listen to music in my classroom as long as I’m not teaching the class or the class is not discussing something. Students can text message in my classroom as long as I’m not teaching the class or the class is not discussing something. I expect attentive listening then. Seems reasonable to me. What do you think?
May
24
Miss can I have some toilet paper
Filed Under Behaviour Management, positive climate | Leave a Comment
photo by clairity.Miss, can I have some toilet paper? I hope I never hear that question. Imagine a student having to ask her teacher for toilet paper. Imagine teachers having to dispense toilet paper. Someone was really thinking outside the box when he or she decided that the best way to curb vandalism in washrooms at school was to remove the toilet paper. lol Thankfully, saner heads prevailed and the toilet paper ban was lifted.
As it turns out, someone has already found a more acceptable way around the toilet paper problem- the Washlet.
I noticed that the Washlet is easy to install and affordable-qualities the school can appreciate. Perhaps if I get a moment, I’ll send the school this link. I’m only to happy to help.
May
10
The 5 W’s and the 1 H of a Classroom Blog.
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Blogging in and out of the Classroom, Computers In The Classroom, Dealing With Stress, Engaging Assignments and Activities for Students, Graphic Organizers, Special Education, The way I see it, Web 2.0 tools and technologies, maintaining a safe, math, motivating students, positive climate, underachieving students | Leave a Comment
The 5 W’s and 1 H of a Classroom blog? OK, OK, I know that the 5 W’s and 1 H of a Classroom Blog isn’t the most creative title for a post, but sometimes tried and true is OK, and all teachers know there’s nothing more tried and true than the 5 W’s and the 1 H, so here it is.
Although my students are pretty digital savy seeing that most spend hours and hours online visiting Facebook, YouTube, playing online games and text messaging, I can’t assume they know about blogs and blogging so I show them the following video. I love it. They love it. As you’ll see after viewing it, Common Craft , the company who makes these educational videos, believes in the KISS principle. I believe in the KISS principle. Keep It Simple for Students. What’s not to like! Common Craft also has videos on TeacherTube-great when YouTube is blocked like it is at my school. Grrrr!!!!
See, wasn’t that a great video, especially for students who are visual learners or for those struggling or reluctant readers in your class who loath the printed page.
My students are usually quite excited when I introduce the idea of a class blog. They like the idea of writing blog posts and having others read what they’ve written. To be more precise, they like not having to write something using pen and paper, and they like knowing that someone other than their teacher will actually read what they’ve written. In the two years that I’ve had the class blogs, only one student has asked me not to publish some of his work. I’ve got no problem with that. At least, he was thinking and writing.
I suspect that the kids also like the blog because when their work gets published it looks so professional-just like the articles in the papers, magazines or even in textbooks. Some of my students have really messy handwriting and are embarrassed by it, and some of my students find the process of forming letters difficult to do so they write as little as possible. When they type their work and use the spell checker, their work looks the same as everyone else’s when it gets published. What they’ve written doesn’t look stupid, so they don’t feel stupid. They don’t have to be embarrased. That’s definately a good thing with reluctant and struggling students.
At first, I was a bit apprehensive about having my students contribute to a class blog. Some of them can be very creative in a michevious way- if you know what I mean. I told my students that I didn’t want to have to take early retirement because something went wrong. I can honestly say there haven’t been any problems. More about that later.
I wasn’t only concerned about inappropriate material appearing on the class blog, I was also concerned about student safety. I didn’t want the class blog to put my students in harm’s way. We’ve all read the horror stories about online bullying or harassment or even worse. Fortunately, it was easy to put all the saftey measures in place to protect my students so there have been no problems in the past two years.
In subsequent posts, I”ll share with you how I made the class blog a safe and inviting place for my students, and why I chose the particular blogging tool I use for my class blogs. Oh yes, I’ll also share the letter I sent home to parents to tell them about the class blog. I got wonderful positive feedback from parents about the blog. I’ll tell y0u more about that later too.
See you then.
May
3
My students are digital natives no wonder they love the class blog
Filed Under "At-risk" students, Behaviour Management, Blogging in and out of the Classroom, Computers In The Classroom, Engaging Assignments and Activities for Students, motivating students | 6 Comments
Good pedagogy dictates that we should always start where our students are. When I used to look at my students sitting in front of me, I could see that many of them were simply not there. Oh yes, there were sitting in front of me all right, well most of the time, but they were just not there. Their minds were somewhere else and not on the task at hand. Notice, that I’ve used the past tense in describing the situation. I’m delighted to say that when I introduced the class blog two years ago that all changed. Now, my students are definitely there.It’s always been challenge to find ways to engage these “absent” students. Like so many other teachers, I’ve spent my entire career trying to find ways to motivate my students to do their best. When I was taking my teacher training, Ken Weber used to tell us that the teacher was the key. I took this teacher- is -the -key business very seriously and tried my best to unlock my students’ motivation. I’ll admit that when I first heard Ken say the teacher-is-the-key, I was a bit more than apprehensive. Being the key to a student’s success is a huge responsibility. But, I was lucky enough to have great profs and mentors who showed me that, yes, I could be the key to a student’s success and kept encouraging me to take up the challenge.
Just about the time that I started teaching, 25 years ago, digital technology started to gradually come into it’s own. I can remember being so excited about finally getting my Computers in the Classroom Specialist and actually getting a teaching job where I could use those skills. I can till remember creating lessons on how to program in BASIC for my grade 10 students on a little Vic 20 that my kids, Lisa and Chris, got for Christmas the year before.
Most kids back then and now as well took to computers like ducks to water with no apprehension about what they were doing while I on the other hand kept worrying that I was going to do something to break the computer. Don’t laugh! All I could think aboutat the time was that the Vic 20 cost $400.00, and I didn’t want to be the one who wrecked it. $400.00 25 years ago was a lot of money. Thank you Uncle Norbet. Lisa and Chris didn’t worry about breaking the computer for one minute. All they thought about was all the cool things they could do with it.
Students take digital tools like computers, video games, DVDs, cell phones, videocams, computers, IPods etc. for granted today. After all, they were born into the digital world. Come to think of it, most kids know more about digital technology than most parents. That’s ironic. My students are wonderful about helping me with any problems that come up. They don’t think it odd that I don’t know everything there is to know about the new technology. In fact, they’re quite happy to help me. I’ve come to realize it’d OK for me not to know everything. My students and I can learn to use the new technology together. They can see life long learning in action.
Marc Prensky calls people born in the last 25 years digital natives, and people like me born before all this digital technology came into being digital immigrants. Like many immigrants, I love my new country but still cling to some of the old ways from back “home”. I keep wanting to print things out to edit them with a pen, and I’d rather read a traditional book than an ebook.
According to Prensky, digital natives who are college grads today have spent
- fewer than 5000 hours reading
But
- 10 000 hours playing video games
- 10 000 hour on cell phones
- 20 000 hours watching TV
- 500 000 commercials
These individuals have downloaded 2 billion ring tones a month, 2 billion songs per month, 6 billion text messages each day and sent 250 000 emails and instant messages. So I can really understand it when my students aren’t too excited when I tell them to open their text books and get out their pens. Text books and pens when they’re used to keyboards and computer screens?
The world wide web has come a long way since the early days. Originally the Web was basically a read only technology where all a user could do was download information. That was great in itself. Today, however, Web 2.0 technology has improved to the point where it has become read/write technology. Anyone with internet access can download and not only read information but also create and upload information for others to read. Kids love to collaborate and are very motivated to use the internet to create information and share it world wide. Look at the popularity of Facebook and YouTube, just to mention two of the most popular sites my students visit.
Just recently, I read an article that reported the results of a poll taken by the BBC. The poll found that kids spend on average 44.5 hours a week in the digital world. ( I’m sorry I don’t have a link to the article. I was so amazed by the statistic I forgot to bookmark the article and when I went back to find it I couldn’t. When I asked my own students if they thought that 44.5 hour figure sounded reasonable, many of them thought it was. Now, even if you have a hard time believing that kids spend that much time in the digital world, you know they do spend lots of time online, playing games, and on their cell phones texting and talking one another. They are definitely hooked. With that in mind, I decided to introduce a class blog. There are some kids of course who don’t have computers or cell phones at home but they are still engaged by them. Their families just can’t afford them.
When I was looking for ways to motivate my students, these kid who spend so much of their waking hours in the digital world, I decided I would set up a class blog and have my students write their daily journals in it. I wasn’t having much luck getting my reluctant writers to write much in their notebooks. I’d be lucky if they wrote three lines. That is, if they could find their notebooks and pens to write with. I knew they could do better, and I was tired of hearing that they couldn’t find their journals and they didn’t have pens.
In subsequent posts, I’m going to go into more detail about how I set up my classblog, why I chose to do it the way I did, my students response to the blog and what I might change for next time..
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