A Portal Into My Classroom

In the first parts of Professor Wesch's rather "old school" presentation

(with an audience in rows not interacting with the teacher who lectures in the front of the room), I found myself reflecting on the question Professor Tufts asked us to ponder...

What message are you hearing and seeing?

In addition to noticing the format of his presentation (almost the antithesis of what he is proposing teachers should be doing in their classrooms) I did think about how he spoke about the need to move students away from the "How many points? How long should this paper be? What do I need to know for the test?" type questions and start asking "Why?"

In my own classroom, I think I've done a fairly good job at moving my students away from asking "Will this be on the test?" (especially common at the start of the school year) to the more interesting questions of "Why do we have assigned seats?" or "Why would anyone threaten to kill a little girl like Ruby Bridges?"

But perhaps I need to do more. Professor Tufts also posed the questions:
Do you think your students are bored or tired of your same lessons? And...Do you accept this or do you think it is a call for a challenge to make your lessons better by possibly enhancing them with some form of technology?

I think Math might be the most tedious subject I teach, and I think, in part, because I don't like the spiraled aspect of the Everyday Math curriculum (exactly the sort of scripted series Wesch warns about), nor do I think the text is particularly challenging to students accustomed to working on memorizing their multiplication tables at hagwons. 

Perhaps I have become complacent in using the series because I spend many hours planning interesting Social Studies, Language Arts, and Science lessons (since I am the only Grade 3 teacher at the school), and by the time I get around to prepping for the Math units, I am burned out. There was a time when I only taught 5 sections of Grade 6 Math with classes of 30 students, and I used to make the students create animated math videos using our school laptop cart. Or we'd go on math scavenger hunts (yes, the whole class) around the school grounds to learn about concepts like pi. <sigh> I need to recapture some of that joy and wonder in my math lessons.

And so, yesterday, our Professional Development Day transformed unexpectedly into a Prep Day, and I thought about how I might incorporate one new technology into my classroom for this quarter. Since I like for my students to create simple quizzes at the end of their country Keynote presentations, I thought I would experiment with a new tool I had learned about through a webinar, but I had not yet used in my classroom, the BrainPop Mixer.

When the students return from Spring Break on April 8th, I will start a fractions unit. Since we are in the Mac Tech lab two days a week, and since every student in my class has a computer and Internet connection at home, I will tell them to check for their understanding using a personalized multiple choice quiz. You too can take this quiz. I used the students' English names (unless they haven't picked one yet), but you need an access code to log in. It's prugh001. The first of many personalized quizzes. I think I will start to use them as reviews for assessments and as a way to pose more open ended responses (also an option).

I'll let you know what sort of feedback I get from this activity. While my students are not yet ready to engage in a world simulation activity like Dr. Wesch's anthropology students (with a game outcome that left me somewhat depressed), I do think I can rise to the challenge of adding some more new technologies in my classroom in order to create more "knowledge-able" students.