Grade 8 Perfect Learning Spaces

We have just finished one of our three "project weeks" here at QMS.  These are weeks where regular classes are suspended and the students participate in a week long discovery project.

This week the students were designing and building their "perfect learning environment".

A bit of background:

A few months ago we asked everyone in the middle school (Grades 6-9) to draw their perfect learning environment.  There was little direction provided, intentionally - we were interested in seeing what everyone came up with.

The grade 9 students then took these drawings and, for a math class on graphing and statistics, analyzed and graphed the data.  They took various structures (water, trees, natural light got put into a nature category, couches and beanbag chairs for comfortable seating) and put them into categories which were then graphed by a different group.

This data was presented, and passed on to, our Grade 8 students.  Their task was to take everything and, using the data, create a scale drawing and a model of their (or the middle school's) ideal learning environment.

They then had the opportunity to present their work to the board of directors building committee who are looking into our new middle years building - a fantastic, realistic learning opportunity.

Below are their creations!

A front view of an indoor/outdoor space.  The area in the middle is glassed in and, if there was a roof, would be open to the elements.  Also note the group tables and very comfortable seating - couches, covered benches, etc.  Finally, there is a fish tank in the corner.

Top view of the above.

 Scale drawing of the above.  1 square equals half a meter.
















A "semi traditional" classroom with iPads on every desk and a classed in "fish floor" down the middle.  Beanbag chairs and a carpet provide a relaxing area for students to collaborate.

A learning commons with an indoor/outdoor area and lots of comfortable seating.  Tables and chairs are spread out around the room to allow for flexible groups with lots of storage space along the sides.

Scale drawing of the above.

A "semi traditional" classroom with beanbag chairs instead of the hard plastic ones an lots of nature - a fish tank in one corner and a pond in the other.  Comfortable seating can be seen as a theme across most of these creations!

A music and theater room.  The scale is quite small, but the room is designed to accommodate a full chamber orchestra.  Sound proof practice rooms are on one end with storage and a teacher area on the other.  The large central area has seating for the band or risers for the choir.
















Overall, a very, very successful project - the students engaged with the mathematics and language requirements of presenting their information.  The fine arts teacher was thrilled with their sense of engagement in the building process.

I intend to do this again, with a few modifications, but am very pleased with the results!

Project Based Learning - Learning For All :)

It's been an adventure in my Math and Science 8 classrooms.  PBL is in full swing, and I'm learning just as much as the kids in terms of what needs to be done.

The first - my gosh is submission management important.  While I have great rubrics that allow me to assess pretty much any type of submission, because there are so many different types, I'm having trouble figuring out the best way to keep them all.

Videos are too big to email, written things have to get integrated with computer generated things, pictures have to be sent and then stored somewhere (or printed?), etc.  You get the idea - I'm longing for the ability to post things to an online repository, and as a school we're moving towards that....

I also have to make sure that everyone is able to demonstrate their knowledge in the group - it's been eye opening to ask a student a fact that their group has put down and see them draw a complete blank.  Even students who make amazing things (cell cake?  Awesome labs?) still have difficulty fully explaining the concept they just showed me.

Perhaps there is something to the "lecture for a bit", or perhaps I'm just too hyper vigilant about the curriculum.

Overall, I've been getting fantastic feedback from all stakeholders in the projects, and it's coming along nicely.

Science 8 is going to start putting together Chapter 1, so hopefully I'll have something more concrete to share later.

PBL - 2 Weeks In

Wow - what a fantastic two weeks of school it's been.  I started with my year long PBL projects from day 1.

My Math 8's are completing a "Mathematics in Life" project where they have been given a persona (accountant, making 45k, married) and are now making important life decisions.

Our first assignment was a blast - they got to write the biographies for their "characters".  They had a blast coming up with what they did as children, where they met their husband, their parents, etc.  Some very creative juices are flowing!

The next thing we focused on was the preparation for creating a monthly budget.  First, they had to figure out what their income is - we talked about RRSP's, government tax, etc.  They had quite a bit of fun working out just how much to save in order to NOT give it to the government!

In science we started creating our digital textbooks.  The first topic - characteristics of living things!  Most students chose to "start off easy" and create a nice table with some pictures, examples and descriptions of the characteristics, but I did have one adventurous group - movie making!

After gathering costumes, the "news report about a lion and a unicorn" went into full swing explaining just how that lion and unicorn interact to both be living things - and it's hilarious seeing Grade 8 students wandering around in a unicorn costume, especially in a uniformed school!

The second textbook topic jumped into cells.  More students got creative with their "explanations" - I have two labs being created, and a cell made out of cake being constructed at the back of the room.  It's debatable which has more icing - the students, or the cake - but we're all having a blast and learning a ton.

I'll be compiling the various creations (pictures, videos, written submissions, etc) into an ePub or PDF format (depending on how serious the formatting gets) and providing it to the students to use on their e-readers.

Overall, I'm thrilled - the only minor hiccup was an initial reaction of "but we really like it when teachers stand and give us the notes" - but after some initial one-on-one work with a brief "lecture", those complains quickly subsided.

On to week 3 - budgetting and more work with cells!

Probes, Pads and Pods

Doesn't that sound like the beginning of a bad B-Movie involving an alien abduction? :)

I've been facilitating and helping out at Touch'N'Go this week and it's been fantastic.  I got to meet lots of great people, and really worked closely with some fantastic educators.

The two workshops I actually facilitated were using iPads and iPods in a UDL environment and using Vernier Probes, iPads and iPods in a science classroom.

A brief summary of both:

We split the UDL session into three sections - Writing, Photography/Video and Sound.  Major apps were:

Writing:

Pages - $10
-nearly full featured word processor.  It has some limitations, but in a school environment, it's pretty good for producing nice looking work.
Keynote - $10
-Nearly full featured presentation creator which is really easy for students to use to create quick presentations of learning.
Bamboo Paper - Free
-Great, simple "use your finger as a pen" tool.  It's a blank piece of paper.  The possibilities are nearly endless :)
Idea Sketch - Free
-Mind mapping

Photography/Video

Collabracam - $6
-VERY cool multi-camera editor.  It takes the feeds of up to four iPod or iPhone cameras and allows a single director to manage recording from devices, send messages to users, etc.
iMovie - $5
-A limited, but still viable, movie creation app.  Limited in that the editing is a bit of a pain on an iPod but still doable.  It's great for quick hits of "what did I just do" or summarizing learning.
PS Express - Free
-Photoshop lite (more like Piknik) with some basic editing and neat filters.

Sound
Quick Voice - Free
-Easy voice recording for the iPad.  Used to record in the field, or use for descriptions of events to replay later.  Other possibilities are huge
Dragon Dictate - Free
-Decent text-to-speech app for quick annotations and some special ed use.

I accept that there are TONS more apps, and many that I use often, but we only had a limited time, so those are what we focused on :)

My vernier presentation was a blast - teachers performed two labs - a friction lab by dragging objects and a heart rate lab - and then contributed their data to a collaborative spreadsheet on Google Docs.  It worked really well - everyone got to play with the probes and see the graphs being created.

Many of the above apps were touched on with specific science uses, and we added LabTimer (16 simultaneous timers) and Numbers (nearly fully featured spreadsheet program).

Overall - a fantastic week with lots of learning!

My Ambitious PBL Plans

So I'm going to try and go full PBL this year in most of my classes.  I've dabbled with it before, and it's worked, but only as a "this is a one unit PBL" or even worse, a single project based on learning (which isn't PBL, but it's closer than not).

Math 8:

Students will be going through "lives" as adults with a specific income, job, spouse, family situation, etc.  They will be making various life choices all including math - choosing the best buys at a store, picking a cell phone plan, planning a party, designing a garden.  I've managed to put them entire BC curriculum into various projects.

Science 8:

Students will be creating a digital textbook of all the required learning outcomes this year.  They'll get given an outcome at the beginning of the week, and within (I think) about two weeks need to have a summary, definitions, a lab, some problems, diagrams, etc.  All the things that would go into a textbook section on that outcome.  I'll then have them create an ePub version with all their content (including video!) to show parents on iPad's and eReaders.

My biggest concern about both of these will be the "this is what is happening all year" type of approach - I'm not sure how students will respond to both having one "project" for the year, and having the freedom to work on their own or with groups, at their own pace (within reason) and without the daily grind of lecture->homework->submit->test.  Essentially, it will be new for everyone!

If anyone has done anything similar, I'd love to get in touch!

The Many Uses of Angry Birds

Angry Birds has been making the rounds as a fantastic physics app, and I completely agree.  I've come up with a few more uses in math for different age levels that I wanted to share.

Classroom practice/study time:  I recently had a group of ESL students come over who were practicing English - specifically, a few sentences they were going to deliver for a powerpoint presentation.  I pulled up Angry Birds and each student said their sentences and then got to fire one bird - as a class we worked through about 4 levels, everyone having a blast.  This can work with any "step" type problem - someone comes up to put the next step on the board, recites a fact they learned, something from a book, etc.

Estimating:  At all levels estimation is important, but specifically at the younger ones where it is taught.  How long will the bird fly if it's this angle?  How far?  How high?  Where will it land?  Justification is great for these as well - "Why do you think that"?

Measurement:  Projecting onto a whiteboard means you can measure off specific distances, and measurement is really at all levels.

Volume/Surface Area:  Determining the volume or surface area of the blocks broken is great for the middle school age groups.  Competitions between groups could include who can break the most surface area, volume, both, etc.

Just a few quick ones - any more?  Please share!

Student Owned Devices

Student owned devices, and their use in the classroom, are becoming a hot topic on Twitter and in education circles that I'm part of.  Generally speaking, the people I talk to tend to be in favour of them.  That being said, however, thats possibly because the people I'm talking with tend to be of a similar mind to me :)

There have been some reasonable arguments against allowing students to bring in devices into the classroom which I would like to explore.

First, my position:  I firmly believe that, issues aside, allowing student devices to be used in the classroom will better promote a technological literacy in students, as well as better engage them in their own learning.

Now, the issues "we" have to work out as a school and education community:

1.  It's too hard to manage.  This issue has popped up the most of any and I can totally see the perspective of the people commenting on it.  It's usually network administrators or IT support people who say this and they absolutely have a point.  Having managed two school networks before I can understand the difficulty of having to deal with different configurations, abilities, settings and systems all the while keeping everything working.

Possible solution:  Set a standard for your school - we will support XYZ for this task, and XYZ for that one.  Then, when teachers want to use another device, have them implement and support it themselves.  Of course, offer support when it's convenient and continue working towards improving the "standard", but for heavens sake don't tell everyone "You can't use this because we can't support it".

2.  Not everyone has a device.  This gets sticky because it can show obvious levels of wealth and split students into categories.  It also causes students to go home and say "Mr. Campbell says we HAVE to have a cell phone in class" when that's certainly NOT what I said.

Solution:  Other than the obvious piece that everyone already KNOWS the have's and have not's in the classroom because students share and use cell phones constantly outside of the classroom, I have found that when devices are used grouping students tends to work best.  I will say "Okay, I need 5 phones, who will volunteer to use their phone to be part of a group".  This allows students to hide behind "I don't want to use my phone" rather than "I'm the only one in my group that doesn't have one."

3.  PD issues.  This goes along with "we can't support it" in that teachers can begin to expect that they HAVE to use these devices without any training, and then get upset because they aren't used effectively.  A very valid concern and one that needs to be addressed quickly after initiating a student owned device program.

Solution:  Provide very simple activities for the less "techy" amongst the teachers that doesn't require any serious support.  Also make it clear that this is not an expectation (yet?) in the school and therefore, to try what they want or ignore it completely.

Hopefully we can work past these (and other) complaints so as to utilize the tools that most of our students already have...