The Simplicity of A SMART BOARD

It surprises me the level of excitement that students have based on the sole fact that you are using a SMART BOARD in class. I am still very technologically illiterate and up to this point, I have only used it for on a very basic level. We have always had a data projector in the classroom and we used it for power point presentations, but it constricted us to simply using the direct instruction method. The students automatically become jaded to the thought of using power points because teachers often use this as their basic means of instruction. Though we use the smart board in the same manner, it seems to illicit a different response. It allows the students to become active participants in the direct instruction method. We can call on students to simply draw, underline, add to, or subtract from our power points with the color pens and they seem to love it. They are engaged a lot longer and they seem to not mind taking the notes because the “add-ons” allow them to better remember each slide.
I have also utilized my Smart Board over the past week during writing instruction. We do not know how to use the writing instruction program yet but the smart board was still able to make it successful. As we continue to receive more training on the use of our smart board it will allow us to have more intriguing and effective lessons.

SNOW DAYS!!!!

I remember when I used to love snow days. School was out, I could sit back and relax for a whole day, and do a whole lot of nothing. In high school, my friends and I would try to drive to each other's houses whether we were out for snow or ice, not caring that we were putting our lives in danger. We were often unseuccessful, but hey, we gave it a try. Snow days in Kansas City means that there is no physical way possible to get to school. I would say that the KCMO district is almost like MU it's rare that it shuts down.

Now I'm on the other side of education, I hate snow days!!! They get in teh way of the wonderful plans you had for the students, set your schedule back, and interrupts preparation time for the semester final (now that Columbia has the semester ending before the break. Snow days in Columiba dont seem to make sense to me sometimes. I know that it's not a reflection on the district, but the city as a while because of the ineffective method of getting the streets cleaned. It seems to me, as I look outside, that I definitely should have been able to go to school today. I tried to give the city the benefit of the doubt and think that possibly the storm was supposed to pick up while we were in school but then the weather man negated that thought and said that the storm and cool air were not going to be around this part of Missouri until 6:30 tonight and that we'd be above freezing for most of teh day. I give the district extra credit for being proactvie and cancelling school early on Sunday night, but I it seems that we could have been on snowroutes and been in school yesterday as well.

I guess I'm just complainig because I got up so early to get ready for school, excited to see my students and now I cant see them and i can't go back to sleep either. Honestly, I gues I'll just get a few things accomplished, God knows (and the Fellows do too ) that I have so many other things that need to be done as well. I guess I've vented enough about my hatred for snow days and the inconvenience they cause because now I feel a littel better.

All This Technology, What to do with It?

Teh technology grant that my partner and I wrote was finalized last week and we received our SMART BOARd, 8 lab top, and a digital camera. We immediately put the SMART BOARD to use, but we do not know how to utilize it to its maximum potential. All we've done thus far is a really cool comic strip to make India come to life, and used it to enhabce a couple of power point presentations. We are going to do more training to learn its capabilities so we can use it as a resource that benefits our studnets in ways that they could not have been had we not received this new technology.

It was humbling to receive lap tops for students' personal use in the classroom but we dont have a good plan to facilitate their use. The room is overcrowded because we share it with another team and it's hard to find space for the to be displayed. We built shelves for storage, but we have yet to utilize them.

Because we have this new and exciting technology, we are at a huge advantage and will begint to implement more activites that encourage students to fine-tune their use of technology. The digital camera, computers and the SMART BOARD will allow us so much versatility in assignments and activites, but we have to follow the Emints model of lesson planning to ensure that we are making the best use of our resources. It is disheartnening to have so much technology in our eduatcional aresenal and not know how to use it. We are in the process of working with our IITS speialists in the building to help with the logistical part of our resources and we have vowed to each other to implement more technology in the curriculum as our expertise on the subject is expanded.

RESEARCH ASSIGNMENT

So my students have had their first real taste of the use of technology in the calssroom. Last week we bagan our researching for our final assessmnet on Africa. The students were supposed to research one region of Africa and gather information on the region before and after imperialism. They were to analyze the impact of European Imperialsim on sub-Saharan Africa.

Sounds like a simple task to me...I could not have been so wrong. Many of the students did not have the computer savvy that I assumed they had. We started from ground one as far as research is concerned. I gave them the websites to visit, what was and was not a good site, and how to document their sources. Though it was a very hard task the students got through it. They took away many key skills that will benefit them throughout the rest of their hihg school career. I haven;t received all of their research information as of yet but hopefully my lie about plagarism and how it is an offense that can send them to jail prevented them from doing it. LOL...They were so scared. English teachers may be mad at me for this one, but I also showed them how to put thir sources into MLA format using "easybib.com." I don;t see this as cheating, I just see it as them using a source, research tool, that will make their lives esaier.

World Studies in High School

I almost feel jealous of my students. I teach World Studies at Rock Bridge and the place that my students sit now, is completely different when I sat in a similar seat in Kansas City six years ago. The way we teach and the material we use for world studies is amazing. Not giving myself praise, but praising the writers of the curriculum and the visionaries who put into motion a push for common assessments that are performance based. I feel like the method the Rock Bridge High school uses allows us as teachers to learn so much about our students. The assessments are creative, challenging, and fun (at least the end result usually is for the students). We finished a unit on the Middle East two weeks ago and are now diving into a unit on Africa. Exploring these different regions of the world chronologically through historical documentation and various forms of literature, we are making the world make sense to our students. We are not teaching them random fragmented pieces of information, we are giving them meaningful material that they will be able to use to help them understand modern day issues and to show them that they are in some way connected to the on-goings around the world. I really enjoy teaching World Studies because I too am learning more every day about the world and my students personally.
Making students socially conscious shows that we are not just into teaching for the sake of teaching, but we are building up good knowledgeable citizens who can take the information acquired and help to make a difference in the societies in which they live. Rock Bridge students are placed at a great advantage because of the required “Studies” program.

Two weeks ago I received some great news. There was an announcement that teachers had the opportunity to write educational grants for pretty much anything they though would be beneficial to the learning of out students. After thinking long and hard, my partner teacher and I realized how beneficial it would be to have a SmartBoard in our classroom. We figured it was a shot in the dark but we tried anyway. We wrote the grant and re-read it over and over, and in my opinion, if I would have been in charge of giving the "thumbs-up" or "thumbs-down" it woudl definitely have been the latter.

The idea of having the Smart Board made so much sense to me and I knew how I would use it, but the grant proposal was missing something. Then I remembered Grapplings Learning Spectrum. I sat my partner down and reminded him that technology is not only supposed to aid in learning but it is supposed to transform learning. When I took our time to think uip all the possible ways that the smart board would allow us to further our contructivist approach to learning the proposal was phenomenal. Reading all of our plans to use it in teh classroom made me so extremely excited and I knew that though receiving a Samrtbora was unfathomable in teh beginning, we had a great chance with this student centered poposal.

We received the news early this past Monday saying that we had been approved for teh Smartboard and after all the training sessions are attended, it will be given to us within the following month. It's ironic how a guy growing up in a district (KCMSD) with limited resources is able to start a chool year technologically illiterate, design a plan to incorporate technology into his teaching, and also be blessed beyond need with instruction changing technological resources ll within a two month time frame. God is doing some great things for me and I'm glad I am favored in his eyes. Because of this blessings he has placed on me, my students will reap benefits even greater as I put my blessings to use.

I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO GET FIRED!!

My experience thus far at Rock Bridge has been very positive. The students are wonderful, my co-teacher is great, and the school environment is pretty close to ideal. Everything seems to be going my way, until one day it happened. I got the scare of my life. I'll just tell the story the way that it happened.

My co-tecaher and I love what we do and we are determined to make learning interesting for our students. The are doing a Middle East unit right now and we thought we'd spice up the interest level by doing a skit depicting the realities of developing a civilization in ancient Middle Eastern times. With me being the narrator and Greg the "Middle Eastern Man" we thought that the skit would be a sure fire way to help the students understand the material while being entertained at the same time.

Greg should have won an academy award for his performance as The Middle Eastern Man. He came in wearing standard nomadic clothing (graduation gown as a sock, no shoes, and a t-shirt around his head. He praised the God of the light, and the god of teh spiders, the god of water and everything else to show this idea of their polytheistic belief and how it was the people's duty to keep the gods happy. I beat chalk erasers around his head to depict a draught and dust storm and immediaely after drenched him with water to show flooding. This was to illustrate the unpredictabulity of the environmental features. We once again prayed to the gods for giving such fertile land and the opportunity to settle although everything was not perfect.

As expected the skit seemed a success, but after one more scan around the room I found a young man silently crying to himself. Tears falling drop by drop onto his notebook. Rationality came to me. This kid is from the Middle East, what have we done!! Did we make clear that we were talking about ancient Middle Eastern development? Did we do anything stereotypical? They did wear head wraps back then, didn't they? All these questions ran through my mind.I wrote him a note telling him I hope he didn;t think we were being sterotypical and explain to him the purpose. I asked him to meet me outside. He left the classroom at the end of the period without one word spoken to me.

i talked to his counselor and told her the situation. I couldn't believe, me, an individual from a marginalized race, did not take the 5 or 6 seconds to explain the purpose of the activity and that i didn't want to hurt anyone's feelings. I know what it's like to be laughed at because you practiceisn;t what people "the norm." I figured that the activity was inconsiderate and didn;t think about the feelings of ALL my students all the way through. I was sure to be fired once the principal heard about my inconsiderate actions.

I found in the end that I was having first-year teacher paranoia. The student indeed knew individuals who were stil polytheistic and performed those same practices today and the activity did not hurt his feelings, but the fact that those people he knows are looked down upon because of their practices. He told his counselor that he nderstood the activity and he that we were his favorite teachers. I was quite relieved at finding out this information.

I definitely learned a valuable lesson. Although this situation did not blow up in my face, I need to remain cognizant of the lessons and activities I do in school. It is important to make sure that I do not offend anyone ith any of my instructional techniques.