Summing up the Year, Part 1

This year, I invested some time and energy to work with ePals and found two classrooms, one in France and one in Spain, which agreed to exchange emails with my class. We spent a lot of time in the beginning just trying to get the logistics down, however, and didn't start exchanging emails until January.

My students were excited about the exchange at first, but, as time went on, and we didn't hear very often from our email correspondents, the enthusiasm waned. Between conflicting vacation times, and lack of time at each end, I'd say we had a total of four 'exchanges' with our French class, and but two or three with our Spanish class, which started later in the year.

I take some lessons from this. One is to start earlier. The teachers I worked with have tentatively agreed to work with me in the coming year, so that shouldn't be difficult. Another is to organize the emails around a theme or joint project. We did this a bit with the French class, where we would ask the students to talk about their families in one series of emails, to talk about their towns in another, and so on. More could be done with this.

I also wonder if we couldn't get more of a joint project with classes who have a better command of English. I know how difficult it is to express concepts in a language you're just learning, and my students this year, with the occasional exception, just knew English. I'm thinking of trying to come up with a joint story on some theme. Something for me to look into this summer.

Photo: View of Périgueux, France - Photo by Christine Lécroart

Bumps in the Road

Ah yes, it is always fun to imagine that life goes in an ever-ascending spiral upwards, and that projects once begun, will take on lives of their own. Sadly, reality, just like the economy, is full of ups and downs, and sometimes it does come to 'two steps forward, one back.'

Our ePals exchanges seem to be at a pause point. About half of my students sent out emails to their penpals during our 'snow week', but we didn't get any student responses back last week, and now the French class at least, is on break until March 8th. We're not sure why, but we haven't heard anything from our Spanish class this month. Some of my students are getting a bit frustrated at the lack of response.

Our class wiki continues to move along. Right now, the most active part is our book review section. This quarter, the students seem used to the idea of regular reading and posting book reports. We had our last batch of posted "Find Outs" for our US History unit on Reconstruction, which turned out to be very handy when our first date for the test was snowed out. Interestingly enough, I haven't gotten much in the way of reaction from parents when I made the wiki public except for one or two offhand comments about "gee, it's nice to see what you're up to."

I'm trying something different tomorrow. I'm going to use the discussion feature on the class wiki to talk about our current book, Ashes of Roses. Right now, I'm just requiring a post some time this week. We'll see what happens.

Snowed in? S'no problem

Our school has been closed since last Friday due to two snowstorms, and it won't reopen until Tuesday at the earliest. By email, my administrator asked us as a faculty to suggest things to do for our students that would allow them to work at home. For my students, I suggested that they write their French and Spanish epals, and I set up a place on our class wiki for them to share what they found out about the French and Spanish schools. I'm rather looking forward to the results!

Update for January

Well, if anyone were following this blog, they'd be mighty disappointed, since I've been posting at the rate of one post per month! Outside of being busy, as we all are, with various school duties, I'm somehow reluctant to post unless I feel I have something to say. Another issue is that I come lately to the entire Web 2.0 world, and I've never gotten into the swing of either checking or commenting daily. There's a part of me that is turned off by the concept of Twitter; yet I can certainly see that it has been useful for some people.

My email exchanges are moving along. My students and I have gotten a number of responses from both our French and Spanish classes. I have a picture of the town, Perigueux, in Aquitaine, in which our French correspondents have their school posted on our class wiki. I'm thinking of some kind of summing up exercise for my kids, in which they combine information they've received from their French correspondents to try and get a picture of what their school is like.

Meanwhile, I'm moving ahead with a version of my 6th grade Humanities course which features very little lecturing at all. As I've mentioned before, I've tried to be very specific on what I want my students to get out of a particular section, and have institutionalized this in a list of "Find Outs" or short points for identification. For my current unit, Reconstruction, I've put in for each item a "identity" and a "significance" header, following what the 7th grade teachers do at my school. I split up the "Find Outs" among the kids, each researching one and posting their answers on the class wiki. I also include some broader questions, some of which I also assign as homework. When I write the test, I have them fill in the identity and significance of some of the "Find Outs" and write answers to one or more of the questions I've put on the wiki.

So far, I'd have to say that it's been a screaming success. The students are engaged, and all of them do at least passing on the tests and most do very well. In the meantime, they're actually reading the textbook, or at least parts of it, using chapter headers and the index to find subjects, and synthesizing what they know in their own words.

One of my colleagues pointed out, however, that taking notes during lectures is a skill that is needed in upper school and college courses. Hmmm...have to think about that. Got some ideas already, but let's see what happens. When I ran that idea by my students, however, they were almost unanimous in their lack of enthusiasm for lecture, and my sense of some of them is that they are too restless or too distracted to pay attention during a lecture of more than, well, five minutes. At least, that's my impression judging from when I give instructions....

Two steps forward

I've always found December a frantic time for teaching. It's a short month because of the Christmas break, and there are plenty of interruptions in it because, for all practical purposes, it marks the end of the fall semester. In my school, we also give semester exams, which means that our regular schedule is thrown out the window for the week before break. Nonetheless, I made some progress this month in getting my international exchanges going.

Yes, international exchanges. I found a classroom in Spain through ePals that was in our age group and was willing to email in English. We just sent off our first emails to them before the break. I'm going to keep my exchanges at two for the moment and see where they go.

We've also now had two exchanges with our French school. I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that our correspondent French school is not in Brittany, as I first thought, but in Aquitaine. I eventually found this out by doing Mapquest searches on towns mentioned in the student emails. My French counterpart did send me a copy of the school's web address, but I haven't been able to pull it up. Perhaps this has something to do with the electrical failure in the computer lab at their school. In any case, it gives us a lot to talk about.

One lesson that I have certainly learned is the necessity for patience. There always seem to be bugs in the system to work out, and, although the tech base in my school is far from extraordinary by US standards, it seems to be better than either of these schools. I just hope that my students can be patient as well.

My second strand has been to turn more of the learning in my class over to my students. As you might recall from earlier posts, this was inspired by things I read over the summer, most notably Never Work Harder Than Your Students by Robyn Jackson. What I've done over the fall is to turn over researching facts, group paper outlines, and finally individual paper outlines to the students and posting them on our class wiki. One big step I took in December was to make the wiki public. I had worked with our school administration to get this approved, and approval came some time ago, but I waited until I thought the wiki was ready. I finally realized that I was waiting for me to be confident enough to throw the switch, which I finally did the first week of December. So far, the reaction I've gotten from making it public has been positive, if somewhat minimal.

I suspect that where I'm heading with this approach is some sort of inquiry-based learning, but I would have to make myself a lot more familiar with what inquiry-based learning is before I would claim to be going there.

I've been trying to keep up with various blogs in my Google Reader. Most of the people I follow seem to be light-years ahead of me in the tech stuff they use, which I find both inspiring and a bit discouraging at the same time. I guess that's another patience lesson; to run the marathon at one's own pace and be comfortable with one's own achievements while being aware of what else is out there.

Another small step

Last week, my class sent its first emails to our class in Brittany, France. We used some stock French phrases (Bonjour, Je m'appelle...) and wrote the rest of our introductions in English. Our corresponding class is a English class in a French school. I'm curious as to how or when they will respond.

Today, I took another small step towards making the class wiki public by inviting my supervisor to be a member. She was favorably impressed by it. I was hoping to get some pictures from our French correspondents and put them on the wiki before taking it public, but I'm thinking now of turning it public after the Thanksgiving break, and adding the international portion later.

My last group project on the wiki was group reports, in which each group posted its sources (from a limited list) and main points of information on the wiki before writing the paper. This seemed to work well on a number of levels; more than one member of the group could access the information, and it gave me an easy and paperless way to check their sources. For my next project, I'm asking my students to do individual reports on the same model; post their sources and main points on the wiki, and then write their paper off of those.

Also for this unit, I have come up with my usual list of questions, which I call "Find Outs," for my students to research. This time, I've assigned each student a "Find Out" question, and I've made it one list between my two classes. I guess we'll see what happens.

Everyone on our faculty was asked to suggest a topic for a workshop for our local AIMS convention next year. My topic ended up as "Evolution of my class wiki." I like the term "evolution," because it suggests a step-by-step forward movement, which is how I've been working in incorporating Web 2.0 in my teaching. I'm sure others have done more, and more quickly, but given the lack of a computer technology person at my school, and the lack of other tech-savvy role models at my school more skilled than me, step-by-step is how I feel comfortable working. Besides, I do have an outside life.

Almost ready to begin international exchange!

Life is still pretty busy. Last week was our Middle School retreat, and I was frantically trying to get this week set up so I wouldn't have to work over the weekend (well, except at the Renfaire, as I explained earlier). This week we get to meet new candidates for the head of our school. Life happens.

The technical issue I had to resolve was that my original epals account would let me create sub-accounts, but they could not send to the Internet as a whole. I took the question of how to get that access to the epals folks, and they set me up with a type of account called SchoolMail, which made me an administrator, which then gave me the power to change the access of my accounts. Sounds complicated, but, after a lot of back and forth, I believe I've finally arrived at where I want to be. I do want to say that the epals folks have been very helpful and prompt in answering my emails.

I have two classes abroad that I contacted this summer, and I've been keeping up with each of them. One is in France, and the other is in Belarus. I'm hoping to exchange our initial emails with the class in France next week. I hope my students don't get confused between the two classes!

Oh, yeah, and somewhere in all this I have classes to teach. In fact, I was asked to develop a 'new' class this year. Up to this point, our middle school has taught US History over the course of two years. We've decided to change this, and, as I am the only 6th grade Humanities (combination history and English) teacher, I was given the job. Actually, so far, it's been a lot of fun, because I've combined the re-writing of the course with some ideas from my summer reading of Robyn Jackson's Never Work Harder than your Students. The end result is that I did a lot of planning for the new course over the summer, and that is really saving me now. The actual number of students I teach is small, which is one of the blessings of teaching in an independent school.

However, one of the curses of independent schools is the present economic environment, which has made it tougher for independent schools to hold their own. Btw, there was an interesting article on this in the Washington Post a few days ago. The article, "Losing the Jacket and Tie for Jeans and a T-shirt," noted that transfers from private to public schools in the county I live in doubled last year. That's probably a better topic for another post, but I must confess that it keeps me looking over my shoulder...

Yeah, been a bit busy, but moving ahead

Okay, so I haven't posted in a while. Sorry to disappoint my legions of fans :-)

Call it an excuse, but I will note that I work all weekends in September and most of October at the Maryland Rennaissance Faire . My wife and I sing and play harp. We're listed as Esty's Harp and Voice under Entertainment - Musicians and Dancers. We enjoy doing the Renfaire, and it does pay a tuition payment or two for our daughters' colleges, but the result is that I work seven days a week from just about the beginning of school until the end of the first marking period, so some things just don't get done as quickly as they might.

On to school news! I've been going through the process of getting parental permission to set up monitored email accounts on epals, which is something they require for students under the age of 13. It took me about a week to send those permissions out and get them back, and I created the accounts today. So far, so good, but there is a technical detail or two still to work out. Right now, I'm hopeful that I can exchange my first emails next week. I also gave an overview of the project to my students and asked them to find Brittany (the area in France where our correspondents are) and Belarus on the wall map. I've sent a list of my students to our correspondents, and hope to get similar lists from them soon. Right now, I think the take-home lesson is that these projects just take a while to set up, and one needs to be patient. After all, we've got all year, and it's a marathon, not a sprint.

Permission to proceed

I got the word today that I now have the school's blessing to go ahead with a publically-viewable wiki and with establishing email accounts on epals. Both of these things have not been done at my school before. I'm excited: this means I can go ahead with my projects, which include an email exchange with classes in Belarus and France, classes which I contacted via epals, and a publically-viewable wiki that will help feature this project. Neither of these things are new in an overall sense...plenty of schools have done this and much more, but it will be interesting for me to see how I can get this all to work. I'm looking forward to this. More details to come!