* This post is directed at the students in my educational technology class, though I think the tips are usable by anyone. Some of the mentions in the post correlate to things we covered during the semester.  In most cases, I’ve tried to link back to the specific class to which I refer.

Dear rising teachers,

At the beginning of this class you all took a survey about your level of experience and comfort with educational technology (results here). As you leave this class, I think it’s safe to say that you’ve expanded your technology toolbox significantly.  If this is all you leave with however, I’ll feel as if I haven’t been a very good teacher.  The primary purpose of this course isn’t to show you a bunch of interesting tools, but to promote a more student centric style of teaching in which technology is an assistant, not the driver of pedagogy.  I introduced this idea in the second class with two other mantras: 1. Move beyond the “bells and whistles” of tech; 2. Use tech to kill “two birds with one stone.”  With these ideas in mind, I offer a few final tips.

Tip 1: Beware of the PowerPoint

Presentations (PowerPoints, Keynotes, Prezis, etc.) are very teacher centric and often over-utilized in the classroom. Brain surgeons didn’t learn brain surgery from a PowerPoint and students won’t remember 30 bullet points about War of 1812 by tomorrow. You’ll know exactly what I mean if you check out the classic comedy routine titled ‘Death by PowerPoint’ embedded below.

Here are some tips on how to make your presentation more student centric.
• Instead of words, use a picture and then tell about it. Often, when I use a presentation, I only use pictures and have the students draw their own interpretation of it and include a caption about the picture. This works especially well if you are telling a story or historical event (see the 1300s Black Death sample).

• Keep it short – if you’ve got more than 25 slides or Prezi jumps (unless you’re just cycling through pictures), you are losing your audience.

• Have activity breaks after a few slides of your presentation for group shares, a hands on activity, or a quick assessment

Tip 2: Use educational websites and review activities (flashcards, games, interactives) to shrink your room.
We usually think of technology expanding the classroom, but it can actually help shrink your classroom in a positive way. Last year, I did a study on the impact of 1:1 on student progress. I found that 1:1 worked well for some activities and poorly on others.

One of the biggest benefits, which I hadn’t thought of until I got some data back, was that the students performed the best when I got to meet with them in smaller groups.

Instead of having everyone in the class on a computer related activity (reviewing for a test, completing a lab, etc.), the students performed best when we split up the class. Half the students worked on a web-based activity and the other half worked with me directly, then switched. Compared with whole class computer activities or whole class teacher led instruction, the results showed a distinct advantage for the blended model. Elementary teachers use stations very effectively (like our speaker @BarbInNebraska), but this methodology tends to lose steam as students get to middle school and beyond. Using technology to shrink your room through stations or dividing the class can increase student outcomes at any level.

Tip 3: Keep Diigoing, Keep tabs on your field, Keep Experimenting
• Many of you embraced Diigo from the first class and have been building your online storage tent of websites. I sometimes search my tags for sites that I bookmarked 3-4 years ago. Without Diigo (or Delicious previously), I’d have wasted time on searching and may have never found what I needed. Bookmark everything that has potential.

• In class on Tuesday, I’ll be sharing with you a list of people to follow in Twitter (organized by content area) and a starter list of blogs to follow. Take some time each day, each week, or even every few weeks to see what others in your field are doing. It will help you grow professionally and get lots of great ideas from fellow educators.

• Try out something new with your classes on a regular basis. If it’s a tech project, more than likely it will fail the first time you use it with a class. The first time I use something new with a class, it’s almost always disastrous. Don’t let disaster stop you from trying it again. Be patient – it’s not the end of the world if you have to spend an extra day on a project.

In closing, when it comes to educational technology, don’t be afraid to let your students teach you a thing or two. As our speaker (@catlett1) in class 13 pointed out, the digital generation knows a thing or two about all these devices. It doesn’t hurt to let them share some tidbits.

In the comments, or on the form sent via email, let me know what you think. Do you feel prepared to take on the classroom of the 21st century? Are there any other things you’ve learned in this class or others that you think are valuable? What challenges relating to technology still need to be addressed?

Today was a good day. While it was a bit of an adventure keeping track of 7 student helpers in a sea of over 2000 people at the NETA conference , things turned out great. Our presentation went very well and the students did an amazing job. That, however, was not the best part of the day.

The best part of the day came about 12:45 as the students and I returned from a lunch trip to Buffalo Wild Wings. While I quietly worried about the possibility that the internet might not work for our presentation – the students filled the van with a post wing-fest gas attack. The laughter and “aroma” continued to rise and crescendoed at a stop light. In the brief lull before the light turned green, Biz Markie popped on the radio. It didn’t take long for the infectious hook to grab everyone in the van. As we rolled down Q Street singing at the top of our longs, I couldn’t help but smile broadly. I knew, at that point, there was absolutely nothing to worry about. The entire wireless network could have exploded and our netbooks gone with it – we were going to be fine. In that van, were 7 young men and a teacher who were just having fun.

When we arrived back at the convention site, the internet was working perfect and moving much faster than the morning. Best of all, the gas attacks seemed to have subsided. We got everything set up without any major catastrophes and proceeded with out presentation. The name of the presentation was “Super Brickiness: Leveraging 1:1 environments for everyday tasks.” As we presented, I went with the teeball approach. I tried to keep my contributions short, then set up the students to knock it out of the park. They executed brilliantly…

For more information on our presentation, go to brickiness.com

* This is the fourth post in my Countdown to NETA series.  My students and I will be presenting at the NETA conference this Thurday and I’m writing a daily post to supplement some of the things we’ll cover during the presentation (and some things we won’t).

I teach science and love it. There are so many fun things to do and always something new to try.  Today was one of those days.  Every year around this time we begin a chemistry unit in my 7th grade life science class.  Admittedly, chemistry is not my specialty and my brief stint as a pre-med major in college made that painfully obvious.  Nevertheless, I know just enough to be mildly deviant.

Chem4Kids.com: Matter

Over the summer I cleaned out the science lab at my school and discovered a small cachet of relatively harmless chemicals that were buried at the bottom of a closet where I kept all the lab coats. The 7th grade chemistry unit doesn’t get too deep, so I’ve never done more than simple labs with household chemicals.  As I prepared for this year’s unit, I broke out the newly found chemicals and did a little research to see what I could do with them.  One of the chemicals I had was Sodium Hydroxide (NaOH) which, I learned, reacts with Alumninum (Al) and separates the Hydrogen (H) as a byproduct. If you’ve ever seen the Hindenburg video, you know that Hydrogen is highly flammable. 

At the beginning of our lesson on physical vs. chemical changes, I announced that we’d be blowing something up if we finished our density lab.  The students finished the density lab in record time.  While they were completing the lab, I combined the NaOH and Aluminum Foil in a glass beaker.  I sealed a balloon over the top and after a few minutes the reaction really got going.  The beaker got hotter and hotter (exothermic reaction) and the balloon started to inflate.

At this point, the students started to disregard the lab and devote all their attention to  the beaker.  Up to that point, I didn’t think the reaction would work well enough for me to harness enough hydrogen in the balloon.   I quickly tied off the ballon and found a long wick so I could ignite the hydrogen without burning myself in the process.  The long wick was a very good idea and the resulting boom and fireball made the students go crazy.  It was the highlight of my school day and a joy to see the excitement on the students’ faces.  I didn’t have a video of it, but I’ve embedded one below that shows the basic idea.

* This is the thirds post in my Countdown to NETA series.  My students and I will be presenting at the NETA conference this Thurday and I’m writing a daily post to supplement some of the things we’ll cover during the presentation (and some things we won’t).

Last week in my Educational Technology class, I showed the students (teachers to be) some simple ways to spice up lesson plans or put something together on short notice.  Most of the sites I showed them have been around for while, but many of the students had never heard about sites like Ted Talks or Slideshare.  We did a quick review of all the sites and ideas, then I gave each small group of teachers a situation that forced them to put together a lesson in 5 minutes or less.  The sites and situations are below.

Presentation Apps

SlideShare.net – Upload your own or search for 1000s of PowerPoints on any subject that you can easily embed on your own site.

Prezi search – Find other Prezi’s that people have shared publicly.

Pete’s PowerPoint Station – The site looks a little childish, but has tons of great stuff for every topic from elementary through high school level.

Great video sites for the classroom (besides YouTube)

Snag Films Education – Features educationally themed documentaries in a variety of subject areas.

Ted Talks – See great speeches and lectures from some of the best speakers in the world. My personal favorite is the marshmallow talk.

PBS Kids Video – Sid the Science Kids, Sesame and more (many are also available on YouTube).

Brain Pop – This is a pay site, but you can get a free trial if you’re in a pinch.  Also, some movies are free anyway.  All subject areas – very well done.

Other simple tech ideas to use for a quick lesson

1. Search study stack or quizlet for flashcards that someone else made in your content area.

2. Do some math review on tutpup.com, thatquiz.org, ixl.com

3. Get embeddable games/activities for your website in Language Arts, Reading, Math, and Science at BBC Bitesize 1 (K-2nd), Bitesize 2 (3rd-6th), or Bitesize 3 (7th+)

4. Take a tour of a current event somewhere else in the world on Google Earth or use english.aljazeera.net for a non-western take on the news.

5. Download Scratch and have students write a simple program. (Downloading it on a bunch of computers probably couldn’t be done in a pinch, but once loaded it’s a great educational diversion).

6. Search Mr. Mansour’s Delicious tags for something that might be worth using.

The Situations

Situation 1 – It’s been a tough week and you decided you were going to throw in a video from the History Channel on the Norman Invasion for your World History class.  You hear that your principal is coming around and making sure everyone is following their lesson plans (micro-manager).  Your plans said you’d be giving a presentation on the Norman invasion along with a “surprise activity”.  It’s your first year of teaching and you don’t want to get in trouble with your principal.  Class starts in 20 minutes – what will you do?

Situation 2 – You are teaching 3rd grade phonics and have covered pretty much everything for the week by Wednesday.  It is Thursday and the test is scheduled for tomorrow.  Mrs. Jilbers gave you an earful the last time you did a test early, so that isn’t an option.  You’ve got a 20 minute period to fill and need an activity.  What will you do?

Situation 3 – You’re covering the periodic table and are totally stumped.  It’s 11:30 on a Thursday night and your lesson plans are due the next day.  You have three great lessons for Monday through Wednesday and a lab planned for Friday.  For Thursday’s lesson you need some more extension on the period table.  The students wore you down this week and you aren’t going to be able to stay awake much longer.  The lesson plans need to be done, but you have too much pride to just slop a lesson down.  What will you do?

Situation 4 – You get word from your principal that the Archbishop is coming to your classroom to briefly observe.  He heard great things about your lessons on social justice.  “Sweet mother,” you say to yourself.  “We were just going to be doing a crossword puzzle out of the book.”  You’ve got your 30 minute lunch hour to prepare for the archbishop and need at least 10 minutes to clear the miscellaneous papers and half drunk cups of coffee from your room.  What will you do for your lesson?

Situation 5 – Your students have been struggling with quadratic equations in Algebra class.  At this point, you’ve given them every problem set you have.  They’re starting to get it, but need a little more practice before you feel comfortable giving them a test.  What do you do?

Situation 6 – You’re doing a poetry unit for your 5th grade Language Arts class. You’ve found some great poems and authors, but you’re voice has been alternating between a high squeek and a scratchy frog.  The lesson calls for you to read several poems and then have the students read the poems in their own style.  What will you do?

My school has been using Google Apps Education for the past 4 years. Over this time Google Docs has seen a lot of changes.  This has been a little frustrating at times, but ultimately has lead to major increases in productivity.  In this post, I’ll explore a couple of tips that have helped me and my students increase productivity and make integration of Google Docs into daily activities seamless.

Shared folders, collections (or whatever Google calls them now)

A little less than two years ago Google updated docs to let you to share entire folders (now called collections) the same way that you could share documents.  To do this, just create a new collection, then share it with whomever you like.  Now, whenever you add something to that folder it is automatically shared with the entire class.  You can give the folder editor or viewer priveleges and any document you place in the folder will inherit those privileges.  With the most recent update of Google Docs, you can start a document from within the collection and you won’t even have to place it in the folder.

Tip 1

Have all your students share a collection with you.  Now they can put documents in the collection shared with you instead of having to type in your email address (lots of possibility for error) every time they share something.  Make sure they use a strict naming convention, however.  I have my students use “Firstname_LastName / TeacherName”.  If students don’t identify themselves and you in the collection name, then you’ll have a whole bunch of collections named “Science” or “Language Arts” and won’t know which folder belongs to which student.

Tip 2

Create two collections for each class you have – one that they can edit and one for just viewing.  Collaboration is what sets Google Docs apart from software based programs, but typing in the email address of everyone in your class everytime you want to share something is a waste of time.  A shared collection with editor privileges is great for documents you want the whole class to collaborate on (spreadsheet are great for this).  It is also very handy to have a collection with just viewer privileges for the class.  I use the views folder to share worksheet or presentation templates I’ve created for the students.  They just make a copy of the document and are good to go.  If you share something with editor privileges, some students will forget to make a copy and start editing on the shared document, which messes it up for everyone.  This isn’t possible if you share with them in the viewer folder.

Tip 3

Collections can go inside of collections – it’s very helpful.  Everytime I have a new assignment that will be submitted on Google Docs, I create a collection in which I place the students’ assignments.  That collection goes into the class collection.  This makes it easy to track and refer back to assignments throughout the year.

Use the Stars and More Options

Stars can be extremely helpful for things that you use regularly.  I star documents that I use regularly like class notes or my lesson plans.  It makes it much easier to find and I don’t have to dig through collections or do searches just to get to the document.  For other documents that I may have misfiled or not filed, I use the “More Options” dial to narrow my documents to “Not in Collections” or “Owned by Me.”

In a little less than a week, some students and I will present at the NETA conference in Omaha about how we operate in a 1:1 science class. The title of the presentation is “Super-Brickiness: Leveraging 1:1 environments for everyday tasks.” Find out some more on “brickiness” here.

As a lead up (and extension) to the presentation, I’m going to try and blog once a day about some ways we’ve been incorporating our Acer netbooks into daily activities this year. This post starts with one of our most recent projects – Science Fair.

Science Fair – Research

What we used
Our science fair journey started a little over a month ago. Students clicked over to Science Buddies and used their selection wizard to come up with a list of potential projects that interested them. I also provided a list of potential projects based on things we’d covered during the year. This is our 4th year using Science Buddies and they do a good job of adding new projects to the site regularly. There are some projects that students arrive at each year, but I let them know ahead of time that I don’t allow repeat projects from the previous year. After reviewing with me, students selected a topic that would be within their skill set and didn’t cost hundreds of dollars to complete. We spent a day reviewing basic research skills and then I set them loose on researching their topic.

Students used Diigo to highlight information from the websites they found and I reviewed their accounts periodically. While some students weren’t as diligent with the Diigo highlighting (they also had to take written notes on the websites), those who used it were able to easily cite their research and quickly review the information they found when it came time to write their papers. The notes served a similar purpose, but the Diigo highlights were much more content rich. It also made it a lot easier for me to help them once they started writing their papers.

Adjustments
In retrospect, it would have been better to spend an extra couple classes on research methods because it proved to be quite a challenge. Students did pretty well at refining search terms and finding relevant websites, but zeroing in on what was important within those sites was the biggest challenge. Sometimes the reading level of the site was too high – so I had them do an advanced Google search by reading level. This didn’t help much with science topics, as very few sites were returned at the basic or intermediate level. Those at the appropriate level tended to be too general or generally unhelpful (there were several exceptions to this, however). Other students came to me stumped, and struggled to come up with questions to get their research started so they could make an informed hypothesis for their project.

After looking over students’ notes and Diigo accounts during the first days of research, I saw several students going in the wrong direction. While I sort of kicked myself for doing it, I ended up creating a weblist with more directed sites – at the appropriate reading levels – to help a number of students forge ahead on their research. I would have preferred to spend more time helping students find good sites on their own, but the process was becoming very frustrating for some and they were beginning to lose focus.

Improvements for next year

Though I feel like the students have improved their research skills this year, I’ve been guiding it a little too much. They’ve gotten better at finding sites with relevant information and changing search terms, but they have a hard time formulating questions for topics about which they know very little. Research also takes some persistence, but the students crave instant answers – somewhat endemic in American culture today. Frustration, boredom, or apathy start to creep in (especially in middle school) when I keep pushing them, for several days in a row, to dig deeper on a topic. It’s one of the biggest challenges when teaching research skills. Looking ahead to next year, I think that I will do mini research units several times throughout the year. Breaking it up may not cure the persistance problem, but hopefully practicing it in smaller bursts will help them stay engaged with practicing good research skills.   While the students’ research was much improved by a 1:1 classroom, we’ve got a long ways to go.

I’m plugging back in today after a little inspiration from EdCampOmaha.  It has been nearly 3 months since last I posted, but today gave me the extra push I needed to jump back in the pool.  The last 3 months have been extremely busy and I’ve had a lot of ideas for posts, but just haven’t found the time to write.  I felt a little disconnected going into EdCamp and attending helped me re-realize how important it is to stay plugged into a PLN – and not just as a passive observer.  While you won’t be seeing any tweets from me (sorry EdCamp tweeters), below is a look back at a few things going on in my classes the past few months.

1:1 netbook study

In January, I started a netbook study with my 7th and 8th grade students.  I divided each grade into two, roughly equal ability groups.  For two weeks the Group A’s (one 7th and one 8th) did all of their activities and assessments on the netbooks, while the Group B’s did all of their activities and assessments with a textbook and paper.  At the end of two weeks, the groups switched places.  Throughout the experiment, I tracked student progress with a variety of assessments and compared the two groups at each stage.  I’m in the process of writing a very detailed study on all of my results in the form of a pseudo-academic paper.  While a detailed analysis of the results is in the paper, the main thing I learned is that the the types of activities for which students use or don’t use the netbooks plays the most important role in terms of student progress.  I had hoped to finish the paper by this week, but have a little more to complete.  I will publish it on this blog when I finish it.

The Green Monkey

The Green Monkey Project (dedicated to making schools, homes, and businesses greener places) is now in it’s 5th year.  We started in November 2006 with a site created in iWeb on a single Macbook.  The following year, I had students try their hand at a little code with nVu, which was a little tough.  In 2008, the students used Yola (then called Synthasite) which made the design easier, but required everyone to be logged into a single account at one time.  Things got a little easier in 2009 when I decided to have students create glogs that we embedded onto a Yola site.  Students could then update their glogs and the changes were reflected on the website.  Unfortunately, we never really finished the site (see why).  This year, I think I may have found the best solution – student accounts on Weebly.  I created a teacher account for the project and then created student users from the teacher account.  Each group of students created their own webpage and added a line of code at the top of their site that linked all the other sites together.  Having a 1:1 classroom made this extremely easier and gave the students far more freedom in terms of design.  We finished in November and have since presented to several outside classes and to the students’ parents.

International Come See What Your 6th Grader Is Learning In Science Class Day

In early February, we invited all the parents to come to our classroom to see what we’d been doing in science class.  The event was a great success.  We had outstanding attendance and the students did a wonderful job of presenting their Green Monkey site and telling parents about how we use the netbooks in our daily studies.  The day was part of an effort I’ve been making to engage parents a little more in some of the things we do. Below is a short Animoto highlighting some moments from the event.

That’s all for now. I hope to give some more updates soon.

Over the New Year’s Holiday, while visiting my parents in southwest Iowa, we video-chatted with my brother and his family in Brooklyn, New York. This wasn’t a typical video chat, but a computer to phone chat using Apple’s Face Time (the computer to phone feature is relatively new – get it here). While this isn’t anything earth-shattering for 2011, I thought it was pretty cool that we could connect so easily with just a computer and a “phone”.

This is part of my dad's original ham radio "rig". Using the black knob he tapped out the dashes and dots of Morse code to communicate with people around the country and world (see QSL cards).

The whole episode got my dad reminiscing about Christmas, 1958. My father was 10 going on 11 that year and received a large receiver (leftover from WW II) to listen to ham radio operators. He’d been learning Morse code with a 78 record that he listened to over and over and was very excited to listen to actual ham radio operators. An elderly neighbor who lived down the street, who’d been a ham radio operator for years, learned about his interest and became a mentor to him. He helped my dad build his own transmitter and gave him the “novice” test to become an officially licensed ham radio operator (only another licensed operator could give the test). In the early months of 1959 my dad, at age 11, became one of the youngest ham radio operators in the world. As a “novice” everything was in Morse code, but as he progressed (and improved his rig) he got to actually talk to people all over the world.

Listening to my dad talk about his rig and some of the physics involved (we’re sort of a geeky family) was amazing. With a short wave transmitter powered by little more than simple batteries you could bounce signals off the ionosphere and talk to people all around the world. Though my dad never did it, he said some enterprising operators were even able to do crude, one-way video over short wave frequencies – video chat in the early ’60s. One of the neater aspects of talking to people all over the world was that it was the custom to send postcards, called “QSL” cards, to other operators with whom you’d communicated. My dad had kept a number of the QSL cards from his early years as a ham radio operator and showed them to me.

Each card had a unique story and gave a short description of a person’s “QTH” (location), the call letters of the operator, their frequency, the type of antenna they used and, often times, a short message. My dad had managed to keep one copy of his own QSL card with the call letters K0TUE and the card from his mentor, with the written message “Glad to be your first contact Jimmy. Good luck with your new hobby.” The date on the card is April 9, 1959 (see below).

As we talked I was completed fascinated by all of it. I’d heard his ham radio stories before, but had never seen the cards before. It really brought it to life. While the world is very flattened with modern technology and chatting with someone across the globe is commonplace today – it was a huge challenge or impossible for most of human existence. Though trans-continental phone calls were possible – they were rare. For many years, after getting his ham radio license, my dad and other ham radio operators in the Kansas City area would patch through calls from service men (communicating through a relay in Pointbarrow, Alaska) to their families back home. For five minutes, families got to communicate with loved ones they wouldn’t see for years – all made possible through short wave radio.

Though I can now have my brother give my class a live tour of a New York museum through the lens of his iPhone, I know that it’s not something to take for granted. It also makes me think about what advances will be around 50 years from now? It also made me think about how mentors can make a huge difference in people’s lives. My dad was very fortunate to have that old neighbor in his life and speaks of him very highly. I’ve been fortunate to have some great mentors (and great parents) in my life and hope that I can provide that spark to someone else. 73′s – MM

My last post dealt with the problem (and solution) of starting class in a 1:1 room.  This post picks up where I left off – what to do the rest of class.  Ditching the textbook and paper notebooks wasn’t too big of an issue when we first transitioned over to 1:1.  I had used the textbook sparingly the past few years and always had any class notes posted online.  What I had only loosely recognized before this year however, was that a large chunk of my students (50% or more) did not have home internet access.  Online notes, diagrams, games, or project assignments are hard to complete if you can’t access them.

Even if all the students had access at home, the information and resources I wanted them to use were often spread out on various blog posts, google documents, and various websites buried in my delicious bookmarks.  The content I shared with them or had them research became disconnected over the course of a unit.  I finally sat down and thought about a better way to tie it all together and make it as accessible as possible to all students.  Bubbl.us was my first stop.

Bubbl.us is a great way to make online bubble charts.  The 2.0 version is much slicker than other alternatives, but now you only get three charts for free (previously it was unlimited).  Nevertheless, I’m willing to pay because it has really helped me organize my units and provide more resources for students with and without home access.  Before each unit, I make a bubble chart with all the main points connected to central bubble.  Extending from the main points are blank bubbles that we fill in with terms or conclusions we draw from labs we complete during the unit.  On the back of the sheet, I put a vocabulary list where students fill in more detailed explanations of things we add to the bubble chart.  Now, students have one sheet that they use the entire unit and only one thing to bring to class.

The other improvement I made was storing all the sites that we use, along with some supplementary sites on a weblist.me.  There are a lot of sites available to store your web resources in one place with visual thumbnails, but none of them compare to weblist.me.  I used to use Sharetabs.com to accomplish this task, but it went down this year.  Weblist does what sharetabs used to do – it provides thumbnails of all your sites, but also allows you to view and interact with those sites without leaving the weblist.  You can also add and subtract sites from your weblist at any time.  If you sign up for an account all your lists are kept in one place.  The other neat feature they have is an “open all” button.  Just click it and all the sites in the weblist are opened in new tabs.  This is great if you want students to have instant access to a group of sites for a lesson.

JMS Sound Unit

It’s been a while.

For anyone who follows this blog (admittedly, not too many) – I haven’t written in over a month. Time seems to be at a premium these days and the transition to a 1:1 classroom has certainly been a factor.  The year has been a challenge and I’ve had to re-tool the way I conduct class.  I’ve decided to share some of my tribulations here in the hopes that someone might learn from my mistakes.

Issue 1: Starting class

Pre-netbooks: Before I had netbooks, students completed a boardwork question in their  notebooks everyday when they came into class.  I posted the question on a google document (that students could access online) and added any notes from the day under the opening question.  Even if we were in the lab, I could just write the question on the board and they could answer it in their notebook.  This was the opening routine for every class, every day.  Every 2-3 weeks I would collect the notebook and grade it for participation.  It helped bring order to my middle school classroom and kept the students relatively organized.

Netbook failure 1 –  No Consistency: This year, I wasn’t sure how to do boardwork.  I decided to skip the notebooks since all the students had computers.  The problem was, I never established a consistent procedure.  Initially, I used Answer Garden a lot, but the 20 character limit was too short for some questions.  If I needed something longer, I switched to a google form.  Other times, I had students enter data from the previous day’s experiment on a shared spreadsheet.  Some days, they didn’t need the netbooks, so I just had them come in and sit down (never a good starting class procedure for middle schoolers).  The problems with this were two fold: Students never knew what to expect on a day to day basis and I was spending a lot of time creating forms and Answer Gardens and then posting them on my classroom blog.  Everything was generally disorganized from the get go and students had to ask each day what they were supposed to do.

The remedy: My remedy has only been in place for about two weeks now, but it seems to be working.  I thought long and hard about bringing back the notebooks, but ultimately decided against them.  In many respects though, my opening procedure is much like it was two years ago, it just has a netbook twist.  Each day, I post a question (on a google doc linked to my website) that students have to answer when they come into class.

They submit the answer to the question on the same google form (linked on my website) each day.  I have  a separate form for each class and they have to be signed into their school Google Apps account to answer it.  Since the answers on the form are time stamped with their name, I can check to make sure each student answered the daily questions over a designated period.  This saves me the time of creating a new form each day and provides students with a regular routine.  To make sure students don’t take too long, I set a classtools.net or online-stopwatch.com countdown timer going once the bell rings.  When the timer goes off, they need to have their netbooks closed, which keeps them from playing around on iGoogle or something else.