Today's Interesting Links

• Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally, Andrew Churches - In the 1990's, a former student of Bloom, Lorin Anderson, revised Bloom's Taxonomy and published this- Bloom's Revised Taxonomy in 2001.Key to this is the use of verbs rather than nouns for each of the categories and a rearrangement of the sequence within the taxonomy. They are arranged below in increasing order, from low to high.
• The New Writing Pedagogy - According to a recent Pew Internet and American Life Project study, 85 percent of youths aged 12-17 engage at least occasionally in some form of electronic personal communication, which includes text messaging, sending e-mail or instant messages, or posting comments on social networking sites. In other words, our students aren't waiting for us to teach them the ins and outs of writing in these digital spaces.
• Microsoft Word - Glogster Instructions - A wonderful tutorial/handout for using Glogster Edu with students
• TICAL PRESENTATION (digitalliteracynow) - Tara Seale's presentation on teaching digital literacy
• Technology Integration for Teachers - Home - The purpose of this site is to take an extensive list of websites that are considered high quality, reliable, and valuable and organize them in a way that even "non-techy" teachers can utilize them. It took around 10 years to collect these resources, but new ones are found every day. All of these websites have been recommended by other teachers and educational organizations and qualify as "the best". You'll find support for all core curriculum areas. In addition, you will find lesson plans, multimedia, and primary sources to enhance your students' learning environment.
• Presentation Zen: Ira Glass:Tips on storytelling - There are a lot of books on presentations, giving speeches, using PowerPoint, etc. on the market. I think I have just about every book ever written on the subject. Many are good but most are rather mediocre "how to books" that seem dated and rarely inspire or talk much about creativity or storytelling, for example. This is why it's important to look outside to different disciplines for new perspectives, wisdom, and creative guidance. For example, I have been reading (and rereading) Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee for the past six-seven months. The 480-page book sits on my nightstand; I usually find something interesting, applicable, and inspiring every time I pick it up. It's a book on screenwriting, yet there is much we (non-screenwriters) can learn.

What Snow Days Are Good For

My family, my friends, my colleagues, and my students joke about it behind my back.

I am a Twitter geek.

I love how I've been able to grow my personal learning network (PLN) as a direct result of the connections, advice, and resources I've gained by participating regularly in Twitter. The community of teachers, bloggers, educational and technology professionals that I follow have helped me grow immensely as a writer, a thinker, a teacher - as a person. I am indebted to my Twitter friends.

As my family, friends, fellow teachers and students also know - I am always a teacher. I can't seem to turn that part of my brain off. I'm always looking for new resources, new ideas to bring into the classroom. I love learning about the art of teaching, so I guess this makes me a student of teaching. When I think about the teachers that have inspired me, they too seemed to be students first, hungry to learn more about their content area and the art of teaching it well.

So I guess it is no surprise that I've spent my last three snow days reflecting on ways to improve my teaching. I've been thinking about how to help others use Twitter to grow their PLN and teaching resources. So, drawing cues from Twitter's #edchat format, I've started a Twitter hashtag conversation.

Using the hashtag #engswap, secondary English/Language Arts teachers are invited to vote on a topic of collaboration each week, and then throughout the week use our hashtag on Twitter to share related curricular materials. It is an online English curriculum swap! We'll use Twitter to share lesson plans, curricular resources, and cool English links. It's a great way to add to our teaching resources.

I've put together a web page to both share more information about our Twitter hashtag as well as archive the resources participants share. You check check it out at http://engswap.pbworks.com. There you will find information about how to participate, how to follow all the resources shared, and how to vote on our weekly topics.

Want to participate next week? Vote on a topic below! Then follow #engswap on Twitter.

Taking Time

This is not a new complaint.
Time.
There's not enough.

It's hard during the midst of the semester to find a spare moment to sit down and reflect on my goals. I find that I spend much of the semester treading water, trying to stay afloat of all the grading, lesson planning, parent contact, emails, etc. It's ironic because I find that when I do give myself time to reflect on my teaching, when I participate in professional development opportunities, when I take the time to blog, I come back to my classroom much more energized. So, I thought I would take a moment at the beginning of the semester, when first semester grades have been put to bed and there is a bit of breathing room, to reflect and set some goals for this semester.

I set one main goal for myself this year - revising my final assessments, making sure that they connect with the skills that I teach throughout a particular unit. What I've been able to do is redesign some of my units. My unit for Night now ends with both a creative and analytical assessment where students put together a creative piece and write an analytical essay both based around significant quotes. This better fits with what I do with the memoir - teaching analytical discussion/writing skills, incorporating quotations into written work, and connecting to themes presented earlier in the class. It worked so much better than a traditional test. In fact, I redesigned a few other tests similarly.

Here's my problem. I like how the new assessments are a better measure of what we've learned and practiced throughout the unit, but they are much more involved, heavy on the writing. This is fine for now, when I've only got 25 assessments to grade, but how do you incorporate more meaningful assessments when you have 90 students to grade? I have struggled with this my entire teaching career. How do I make the work in my classroom meaningful and not kill myself with the grading of it?

The core content classes in our high school have just finished putting together common final assessments, in which students take multiple choice final exams that are composed of higher order thinking questions. But I still struggle with whether or not a multiple choice test is the best measure of what a student has learned. Especially in an English class. Are one or two questions on tone enough to assess whether or not a student can write clearly about an author's style, tone, and technique? And yet such multiple choice tests make it easy to get feedback returned to students in a timely manner. I supposed it is about finding the balance, which I'm not sure that I've achieved yet.

So for the second part of the year, I think I need to revise my goals. I still plan to look at my unit assessments, striving for more of a backwards design approach, but I need to balance this with what I can realistically grade when I have three full classes.

A second goal I plan to work on is increasing the transparency of my classroom. I found during first semester that I got an amazing response from students and parents alike about how open my classroom has become. Posting all my assignments and handouts on the web, inviting parents to participate with us on our class Ning and wiki, and especially granting students and parents access to the classroom via our live streaming web camera has been a positive experience. While students presented their "This I Believe" essays in class, parents joined us, emailing me wonderful positive feedback for students that were not even their children. The parents especially have liked having this opportunity open to them, even if they rarely take advantage of it. The students were the ones to use it most, watching the classes they were absent for. And for me, it has been an amazing vehicle for assessing my teaching. So I plan to explore how to continue that transparency.

Now, I just need to find the time.

Google Goodies

• 100 Great Google Docs Tips for Students & Educators | AccreditedOnlineColleges.org

• googleined - home
  Google More... An Introduction to Google Tools in Education Google provides much more than just a web search engine; they offer a wide variety of free web-based and desktop applications. This wiki was created to support a workshop that introduces participants to many of these services that may be useful to teachers and students. Please feel free to add to these resources by clicking on "Edit This Page" above.
• Reframing Google's search options - NeverEndingSearch - Blog on School Library Journal
  Over the past couple of years, those brilliant Google engineers designed stunning search options, moving Google search way, way beyond an effective, but relatively unflexible vertical search. And over the past couple of years I've been pasting links to all these options into my subject pathfinders so my students can find them. The problem is--so many of the very best search options are buried in the vast Google wilderness of labs, or in the wonderful pulldowns of more and even more--places where few but our most intrepid students and teachers dare to go.
• springfieldlibrary - Google Search Options
  Google Tools
• Kiva - Kiva Lending Team: Team Google Certified Teachers

Research Tools: Be the Spider

^{Cross posted at: http://wardsworld.pbworks.com/Better-Researching}

Be the spider, not the bee
When looking for food, the bee travels from flower to flower to flower. This is the traditional way that we think about researching. We go to a search engine and jump from web page to web page to web page. This is tiring and inefficient. Instead, we need to be like the spider.

The spider spins a web and waits for his food to come to him. He doesn't waste time. He has found a better way to make what he wants come to him. So, how can we do that as researchers?

BEE A Better Searcher: Google Smarter, Not Harder


Using Better Search Terms and Options
WHAT TO PUT IN THE SEARCH BOX: Use this handout

• It's all about your search terms. Before ever putting a word into the Google search box, first spend some time coming up with 5 - 10 specific search terms. In fact, refer to these pages to help you refine your search terms.


• Use quotation marks to limit results. Putting quotation marks around your search terms tells Google to return results that include only that exact phrase. This is especially important to use when you are looking for research on uniquely worded or specific terms. For example, there are over 16 million results for India's water supply but only 186,000 results for "India's water supply," and the results that are returned when using the quotations are more relevant.


• Search within a specific website (site:) Google allows you to specify that your search results must come from a given website. For example, by typing India site:nytimes.com Google will return pages about India from the New York Times website. You can broaden this, too. If you type India site:.gov, you will get results from a .gov domain.


• Use the minus to limit what your search returns. When you put a minus before a word in the search box, Google will not return sites that include that term. For example, by doing a search like salsa -dancing (notice there is no space between the minus and dancing), the minus will remove "dancing" from the search results you get back.


• Define: Need a quick definition? Type define: word and viola! An instant definition!


• Use OR to refine your search. Google's default behavior is to consider all the words in a search. In fact, you don't need to use and because this is Google's default. If you want to specifically allow either one of several words, you can use the OR operator (note that you have to type 'OR' in ALL CAPS). For example, Philadelphia Phillies 2008 OR 2009 will give you results about either one of these years, whereas Philadelphia Phillies 2008 2009 (without the OR) will show pages that include both years on the same page.


• Use the tilde to find synonymous search terms. Adding the tilde (~) before a search term will help broaden your search because the tilde tells Google to return not only the search term you specified, but also terms that Google thinks are synonymous with your term.


• Use an asterisk to find a quick answer. Sometimes the best way to ask a question is to get Google to fill in the blank by adding an asterisk (*) at the part of the sentence or question that you want finished into the Google search box. How many MPH can the world's fastest man run? Ask Google by typing the world's fast man can run * MPH.

USING THE ADVANCED SEARCH:


GOOGLE SEARCH OPTIONS: Search smarter using timeline searches, scholar searches, and book searches

• Google Books: Search full texts of books (hint: use the search box to the left of the book's pages)


• Google Scholar: Search scholarly online journals, presentations, and texts


• Google News: Search worldwide news sources

Tips and Tricks for Searching Sources Faster

• Control + F opens a find box at the bottom of the page to make searching within a document for specific information even easier. This works on any web page.


• Search a specific site by using site:


• site:wardsworld.pbworks.com Kite Runner will return pages on my site that mention Kite Runner


• site:.edu India water shortage will search educational sites for mention of India's water shortage issues


• filetype:.pdf (or .doc or .ppt, etc.) will help you find specific file types (this can also be done from the advanced search

How Do I Know I Have Reliable Source?
RESEARCH TIPS:
1) Always check your work: validate the information by looking at multiple sources
2) Credibility =trustworthiness + expertise Strategies to determine trustworthiness and expertise:

• Check the "About" section - look at who is publishing the site, the author's credentials, sponsoring organization, citations to other works. Use this to assess the bias.


• The URL - is the web site from an organization you've hear of?


• Type of page - is it someone's personal page?


• Type of domain - .edu sites are generally more believable than some others


• Where - is the site hosted in another country?


• Is there a date and an author?


• Do others cite this source? Use link: to see what links to a website

^{Information from this presentation}

Make the WEB Work Harder:
Google Alerts

• Create Alerts to send relevant news resources to your email inbox. BE THE SPIDER!

Access Your WEB of Research Anywhere:
Online Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking: Delicious tutorial

View more documents from Maggie Verster.

Professional Development Links

• Teach Digital: Curriculum by Wes Fryer / ingredients
  Good teaching is similar in many ways to good cooking. Recipes are helpful, but master cooks often modify those to meet different needs and situations. The same is true for teachers. If we extend this analogy of cooking to teaching and learning in a web 2.0 world, what are the best "ingredients" to use as we help both teachers and students learn to be more effective, safe, and powerful communicators in our flat world? As we blend learning by providing digital opportunities to interact with content and individuals along with face-to-face, synchronous interaction, we can increase student engagement as well as student achievement.
• Authentic Assessment Toolbox Home Page
  The Authentic Assessment Toolbox is a how-to text on creating authentic tasks, rubrics and standards for measuring and improving student learning.
• principals - legal
  CIPA, COPPA, and FERPA Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA) * FCC Summary * Judicial Interpretation of CIPA's Unblocking Provision: According to the Supreme Court, a library that is required to filter can either disable the filter or unblock a site in response to an adult patron request to do so. Justice Rehnquist stated "[a]ssuming that such erroneous blocking presents constitutional difficulties, any such concerns are dispelled by the ease with which patrons may have the filtering software disabled. When a patron encounters a blocked site, he need only ask a librarian to unblock it or (at least in the case of adults) disable the filter." FCC Order 03-188 subsequently instructed libraries complying with CIPA to implement a procedure for unblocking the filter upon request by an adult.
• educon22 - home
  What is EduCon 2.2? EduCon 2.2 is both a conversation and a conference. And it is not a technology conference. It is an education conference. It is, hopefully, an innovation conference where we can come together, both in person and virtually, to discuss the future of schools. Every session will be an opportunity to discuss and debate ideas -- from the very practical to the big dreams.

Google Goodies: Links

• Home (Google Teacher Academy Resources)
• Welcome (Gone Google)
• Welcome to Aviary
  video editing on the fly
• Gapminder.org - For a fact based world view.
  Fun with statistics
• Google Certified Teachers | Google Groups
• What is Google Voice? | Business Center | Macworld
• Home (Dan Russell's Home Page & Site)
• copyrightfriendly - home
  Most of the media in these collections are attached to generous copyright licensing. Though you may not need to ask permission to use them when publishing on the Web for educational purposes, you should cite or attribute these images to their creators unless otherwise notified! If you see any copyright notices on these pages, read them for further instructions. Note: always check individual licensing notices before publishing on the Web or broadcasting!
• New Google Features: The Five Best New Search Tools -- And How To Use Them (PHOTOS)
• #gtadc - Google Teacher Academy DC 2009
• 2 Great Days at #gtadc | 21st Century Literacy Log
• K12 Online Conference 2009 | GETTING STARTED KEYNOTEThe Wizard of Apps
• Google For Educators
• Google Certified Teachers (Google Teacher Academy Resources)