The 21st Century Student

Picture taken by Rachel using her iPad.

Tonight I want to dedicate my post to one of my students because today she made my day special. Most of all she made me proud to be her teacher. For over a year, I have spent my time being an advocate for 21st century education and I often times hear jokes about technology and questions on why changes should be made in the classroom. My answer tonight is for students like my student, Rachel, the 21st century student.

At the beginning of the year, I had hopes for my class to blog, but with the adjustment of going from a traditional classroom to a 21st century classroom many of the students were not quite ready to blog with all the other changes they were experiencing at the time. Recently, on her own, Rachel started mentioning her blog. Curious, I asked her about it and she said it wasn't a real blog, but an area on a computer where she was typing about her day. I knew at this moment she was ready to learn to keep her own blog, the one I had hoped the students would have started at the beginning of the year. So, just yesterday, we worked on setting up a blog for her using edublogs and this morning she came in ready to write or you might say type.

When Rachel walked in this morning, she had one thing on her mind. I had assigned a tessallation project using StoMo and iMovie on the iPad and she had hers complete. She couldn't wait to show me! When she played her video I was amazed! So much, that I shared her video at lunch with the other teachers and sent it to my principal who was home sick today. As soon as we came in from lunch and recess today, Rachel was on her blog writing, not because I asked her to, but because she wanted to. What was she writing about? Her project, what else would she write about today?

When her blog was complete, she was excited for me to read it, and had hopes the world would see it, too! After receiving special permission from her mother to have her video project online, Rachel was so excited that she jumped and yelled "I AM SO FAMOUS!" You see Rachel is proud of her work, and like many other children in the 21st century she wants a chance to share it with the world and for the world to watch, read, and listen.

So, tonight I ask that if you are reading my blog, go visit Rachel's blog and post a positive comment and make Rachel the FAMOUS person she already is! Because this child is just one of many children who need a classroom that engages them using 21st century methods.

(Please note, my student uses a pseudonym to help protect her identity and all comments on her blog are monitored by me. All negative comments will be removed.)

VolunteerSpot

I was recently on twitter, when someone posted a link advertising VolunteerSpot. It was advertised as a way to keep track of volunteers and limiting the number of volunteers for one thing. I was quickly intrigued, especially with helping coordinate field day for school and needing chaperones for an upcoming field trip, that I opened the link to see what it was all about. Today I finalized everything for my field trip and sat down to use VolunteerSpot and I must say I am in love with this website!

Today I only tackled setting up VolunteerSpot for my field trip. My class is going on a field trip and sharing a bus with another class. The parents in my class are great about volunteering to go on field trips, but I have a small problem because I can only take 6 parents on the bus. In the past, I have handled this problem different ways: I had a lottery and pulled names of parents and also took first parents to come in with a form. The problem with the first method is that not all the parents picked turned in their form right away and he problem I faced with the second method is that I had filled all the seats for parents on the first morning and had to tell some of the parents of children who came in that first morning that the seats were filled.

So far, it seems VolunteerSpot seems like a fair method for getting parent chaperones and arranging which parents will get to ride on the bus. For example, tomorrow I'm sending out one email to all the parents in my class with a link to sign up as a chaperone. Parents will have two options: one to chaperone and ride the bus and the other to chaperone and carpool. The great thing about VolunteerSpot is once 6 parents have signed up to ride the bus, no other parent can sign-up for this section. I also don't have to let parents know that the seats are full because they will see that already online. It seems like the fairest way for parents because if their child is sick all the parents are still getting the information and it isn't a matter of whose child made it to class first.

Tessellations, StoMo, and iMovie

Well, it has been a while, I won't lie since my last post, but I'm going to set a goal to post more frequently onto my blog. Recently, I began taking a Web 2.0 course and to be quite honest, I am slightly disappointed because I am running a 1:1 iPad class and my course acts like I have never encountered Web 2.0 tools or used them in my classroom. I sit at my computer doing the assignments thinking I can teach the course better and I could do it in a more interactive way. In return, what I have is the drive to write what I do in my class because honestly, I get more ideas from blogs than I am from the course I am taking.

Last week, like many other teachers, I began focusing on what I was going to teach for the upcoming week. In math, we were getting ready to reach the math lesson on tessellations. Every year, I have the children create their own tessellation and I always have children who will do a beautiful job and those that just wanted to be done with the assignment. So, I thought to myself there has to be something more I can do to showcase the students' creativity and bring. So, I began searching to see what other teachers are doing and came across Tessellations Revamped for an iPad. This is a blog posted by Chelsie Meyers for a lesson she did with her students on tessellations. The students design a tessellation, and using the StoMo app and iMovie app on their iPads they create a movie of their work. Here is an example, 

Today when I introduced tessellations and this project to my class, I received a much different reaction from my students. They were excited, in fact they shared this excitement on Edmodo with 34 comments in one minute. I would say this project is a success!

Well, I certainly would love to write more, but this school year I adopted the cutest little dog, Sadie. She shares a love for technology, and unfortunately I have to compete with her to be able to use my own computer and ipad.