Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Week 16 - Blowing the conch

I've been getting the sense that not all the students during our 20 percent time have been spending their time wisely.  Some students have been diligent bloggers and working on their projects, but some need a bit more structure.  I decided to blow the conch to gather the civil and savage alike.  I introduced a mini-lesson on creating Powerpoints/Presentations that engage the audience.

Each week students will learn a skill that they'll be needing in order to complete the project, such as creating presentations, speaking in public, and the use of technology.  I showed the students the slide I made below to get us started.


I took about 5 minutes to show students how to add an image as a background, insert text boxes, change the fill and text color.  One thing the students utilized was the rotating of the text boxes.  I also quickly shared how graphic design usually takes advantage of 2-3 colors.  Once students created their presentations, named their document Period X-First Last, Presentation Slides and then shared, I peeked into each student's slide.  If anyone is using Google Docs to create and share items, I'd highly recommend using a naming convention like I have.  You can just hit the period and the name of the assignment and you'll have a list of all the students that shared.

I thought that students would take a few minutes and finish quickly so they can move onto their 20 Percent Projects, but many students used the whole class period to perfect their slides.

Most of the pointers that I was giving them were based on my preferences for design, but I was inspired by Slideshare.  I get a weekly digest of the best slides of the week and when I have time I'll peruse them to get ideas for class.

The thing that I was emphasizing was having an engaging image with minimal text.  I was really pleased with the work that the students did.  Some students finished their slides and wrote on their blogs about their slide.

My intent wasn't for this mini-lesson to take the whole period, but the students were very zealous about creating good slides.  I even had students that normally don't do anything turn in some very nice work.





Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Week 15 - An absolute rose?

After a week off from blogging, I had students return to their projects and blog about what they have been working on.  I've been going through a series of quick little lessons on what smart people do.  So far I've said that smart people reflect, read, and think flexibly.

As I was reading some of my students' older blog posts, I read a student's that had great potential.  She is a part of the Peer Assistance Leadership team at our school and she blogged about going to a workshop at a nearby community college.  Perhaps to her, her blog is like when Daisy Buchanan says Nick reminds her of "an absolute rose."

This is untrue.  I think she is bit off in adding real purpose and valuable content to her blog.

At the workshop she attended three sessions: one dealing with gun violence, another highlighting how everyone is valuable, and lastly a session on seeing signs of abusive relationships.  She merely summarized the topics of those sessions a instead of reflecting on what she took away from them.  They seemed like pretty powerful presentations, but merely summary.


The purpose of my blogs has been to use it as a reflective tool as well as sharing with others.  I think that even in my blogging, that my writing has leaned more towards what I have done rather than what I've been thinking.

I think I'll need to address this idea of some deeper self-reflection as they continue to work on their projects and blogging.  This is sort of new genre of writing for myself and my students.

Next week I'll present on how to add a bit more reflection to their blogs and why that matters.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Week 14 - We search with research

This week I gave students a break from blogging to focus on research.  I wanted the students to learn more about whatever it is that they are working on.  In my last class of the day, a student asked, "I don't need to do any research for my project."  Questions like this, where students don't really think about what they are asking make a bit upset, especially at the end of the day.

When I found out that she was doing her project on movie reviews,  she totally opened up the gates for a teachable moment.  I suggested that she read professional reviews of movies that she has reviewed.  I suggested she look up how other reviewers leave their stamps on their reviews, be it a thumbs up, stars, rotten tomatoes, etc.  I said, are you including the names of the actors, directors, producers, what movies the actors have been in previously.  She began to see that she needed to do a little digging before moving on with her reviews.

It had never occurred to the student that she could learn from looking at other people's work.  This is precisely why I had students spend today's class period doing that.  Of course I want to keep kids accountable for the time spent in class, so I made a Google Form where they had to reflect on what their goal was and whether or not they accomplished their research goal.


Knowing a few of the projects and how they needed some more information, I also posited that they could search how to take better pictures and videos, find recipes, how to get more traffic on their blogs and websites.  Ultimately, it was open ended and they just needed to research something related to their project that will improve the work they are doing.  Below area couple of students' summary of what they found from the research.


I hope that today was time well spent.  What they did today will hopefully make for good blogging material for the students as well.  I hope that they will periodically do some research on their own and make it a process they internalize so they can apply it to other situations.  I guess that is the whole point of a project like this right?