David Warlick : Activity

What are We Going to Plug In?

Thu, 07 Sep 2006 10:22:48 GMT

I think that part of describing blogging best practices is describing things for students (and teachers) to blog about. So I'm going to pepper in here some writing assignments that I think might helps students to orient themselves to the future, and still help them to learn something about their heritage.

Something came up the other day that got me to thinking about plugging things in. I realized that when I was very young, and they invented electricity (ok, let's fast forward just a bit), and there were electric outlets in our home, there were only a few things that you plugged into these outlets. They were lamps, a radio (if you had one), and a TV (if you had one). I honestly can not recall anything else that you plugged into the wall. But over the years and decades we added electric friers, toasters, alarm clocks, telephone answering machines, crock pots, many of our toys, stereos, computers, and charging our PDAs, mobile phones, cameras, MP3 players.......

So, here's my assignment for the next generation. I suspect that the same thing might be happening to our youngsters, where today, you connect your computer and maybe your PDA/phone to the Internet. As the years and decades progress, what else might we connect to the information network and why? Blogit!

Technorati Tags : bloggingbestpractice warlick socialstudies science

Image Citation:
Adactio, "When Plugs Attack." Adactio's Photostream. 18 May 2006. 7 Sep 2006 <[Click to view link]>.

So What's for Lunch?

Mon, 04 Sep 2006 12:19:34 GMT

Blogging is more, to schools, than an instructional strategy for promoting better reading and writing. It is an effective way to communicate, and isn't that what schools and schooling are about, communicating?

So, to model communication, in a post-web1 information environment, we should be blogging as professionals. Perhaps even, the lunchroom manager. What kinds of communication are not coming out of the lunchroom. This is where our children eat. It's where they get their nourishment, their nutrients, the fuel that they go and grow with. The lunchroom is an important place to growing children, and there is much information involved in what and how we eat.

Here are a few ideas of what the lunchroom manager might blog:

Daily lunch menu
Nutritional value of today's lunch
What else students should eat today to achieve the daily requirements
Lunchroom etiquette
Table manners
Food News
Food & Nutrition web sites

So what's for lunch?

Technorati Tags: warlick bloggingbestpractice nutrition food health blogging

Image Citation:

Smithereen11, "Day01.138.jpg." Smithereen11's Photostream. 20 June 2006. 4 Sep 2006 <[Click to view link]>.

Continued Improvement with Blogging

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 09:33:48 GMT

The first science teacher says, "You know, I attended this workshop over the summer, and we set up a blog."

The second science teacher slaps both hands on the table and says, "Ok, what the h... is a blog? It's all I hear -- blog, blog, blog, blog, blog!"

The third science teacher says, "Yes, what's a blog?"

"It's real simple." Replies the first teacher, patiently. "It's like a diary. You write an entry every day, or several times a day, or once a week, or anytime you want to write something down. You click a button.
Write into a web form, hit the submit button, and you've written into your blog. Other people can come in and read what you've written."

"But I don't want anyone to read my diary." Exclaimed the second science teacher.

"Yah!" followed the third teacher.

"Well, because it is so simple to do, people are using blogs for all sorts of things. It becomes almost like a personal magazine where an individual writes things that they want other people to read."

"Hmmm! What if you don't have anything to say that other people would be interested in." Said the second science teacher.

"Then you don't blog." Said the first. "But everyone has something of value to say to others -- especially teachers."

"Hmmm." responded the second.

"Hmmm," repeated the third, now staring out the window of the classroom.

"So we could blog our homework assignments for our classes?" asks the second teacher. "Blog can be a verb can't it?"

"Of course" replied the first.

The third teacher was still staring out the window.

"We could blog about things we have read in the news papers and journals, for our classes to read." Said the second teacher a little more enthusiastically.

"We could even ask the class to write comments about our reports on our blogs" Replied the first.

The second teacher began to tremble a bit, which was her nature when she got excited. "Of course! Can students blog, could we ask them to about newspaper and magazine articles they have read?" Asked the second.

"Probably! And then they could comment on each others blogs" Replied the first.

The second teacher's chair was beginning to rattle a bit from her excitement.

The third teacher then focused back on the other two and said, "Wait a minute. Let's take this a little slower. Aren't we supposed to be meeting about how we are going to plan for and maintain continued improvement in the science department?"

"Yes!" said the other two, surprised suddenly, that the third was still with them.

"Can we blog so that only the three of us can read each others blogs?"

"I guess so." Answered the first.

"Ok, so why don't we just blog once a week, on Monday, and just describe what we are going to be teaching that week and how. Then we could read each others reports and comment on them with suggestions and with materials and equipment we have that might help. Wouldn't that be a way of continually improving our instruction?"

The other two snapped their fingers in unison, and started writing furiously in the paper form they were filling out, describing how they were going to start using blogging to facilitate continued improvement.

"And the first thing we could write about is how we we use blogging in our science instruction." finished the third teacher.

Technorati Tags : education science bloggingbestpractice administration

Protect the Information

Fri, 25 Aug 2006 09:42:21 GMT

This isn't really a lesson plan, but it's important. Blogging in the classroom opens up opportunities for kids to be kids, and kids can be mean to each other. CyberBullying is a common and potentially damaging problem, where children attack each other through their blogs and other online avenues, or misrepresent each other in order to slander classmates that they are currently feuding with.

This is a problem of ethics, and it is a problem of literacy. We are an information society, and the integrity of our information infrastructure is crucial to any success that we have in the future. If we can not depend on our networks, then we will not be able to use them to accomplish our goals. This is why computer viruses, malicious hacking, and spamming have had such a monumental impact on society. It degrades the infrastructure that we live on. Simultaneously, being able to rely on the information that we encounter is just as important as the wires and routers. For the same reason that we need to protect the hardware and software, we need, also, to protect the reliability of our content. This is why teaching the ethical use of information should be considered a part of teaching literacy.

There are several ways to do this, and it need to be integrated into our classrooms at the earliest ages. For instance, when kindergarten and first grade teachers invite community helpers into the classroom, they should include in those discussions how they use the Internet and e-mail to provide their services. The information infrastructure must be presented as a community platform, that must be protected.

Announce to your middle school students that they will all be observing a week without technology -- no Nintendo, no YouTube, no IM, no Google, no TV, no technology. When you have finally settled the class back down again, ask them why the object to this assignment. Ask them to talk about how critical the information infrastructure is to them.

Include in your schools conduct policies information abuse and cyberbullying. This must become part of our ongoing conversations. Students must learn that information is not merely something to be played. That it must be worked and protected.

Image Citation:
RoadRunner, "Dog Fight." RoadRunner's Photostream. 27 July 2006. 25 Aug 2006 <[Click to view link]>.

Technorati Tags : blogging bloggingbestpractice ethics literacy

Foreign Language News Exchanges

Mon, 21 Aug 2006 11:49:23 GMT

Blogging, perhaps more than any other communication technology, lends itself to foreign language studies. Teleconferences are a rich way to become more fluent in a language, but writing, especially in a blog, requires and affords the time for serious consideration of wording and style of writing, no matter the language.

Another area that blogging across languages can encompass is current events. First of all, to practice languages through blogging, you need a class of students from a country (or region) that speaks the language you are teaching, and wishes to practice your students native tongue. An excellent way to find such a classroom is the ePals web site (http://epals.com/). You will need to establish a free account with the service, then use their "Find Classrooms" service, which gives you access to their databases of teachers and classrooms around the world, who seek collaborative relationships with other countries.

After you have found and negotiated a relationship with another classroom, come to an agreement on a current event story. Ask students in your class to write a blog entry, in the language they are studying, that summarizes the news story, as it is presented from their local news sources. The students in the distant class will do the same thing, but in your native language, the language they are studying, and from the perspective of its reporting locally. Students could then be encourages to explore the differences in perspective, and the usage of language, around the current event, holding these discussions in the languages of study.

This activity could be adapted to the level of language experience that the students have, and it could be culminated with a video teleconference for final discussion.

Image Citation
Bartemaeus, "Help." Bartimaeus's Photostream. 6 Jan 2006. 21 Aug 2006 <[Click to view link]>.

Technorati Tags : education warlick bloggingbestpractice foreignlanguage socialstudies

Weekly Math Problem

Fri, 18 Aug 2006 12:02:28 GMT

For the year that I was a math teacher (I was a lousy Math teacher), I tried to keep my students engaged in the reasons for math, by giving them a weekly problem to solve, what we use to call word problems. I tried to tie the problems to something that they could identify with. The student who came up with the answer first got five points added to any grade that they earned during the grading period.

The problem was that although this technique encouraged my students to do math, it did nothing to help them learn to do something that is just as important -- to talk math. In this age of information and communication, to answer the problem might actually be secondary to communicating to someone how to solve the problem.

So, if I was teaching math today (surely as a result of some cosmic and karmic punishment), I would ask my students not only to answer the problem, but to explain, in their blogs, the steps that other people might follow to solve the problem. One benefit is that since blogs are time-stamped, it would be easy to tell who solved the problem and described the process first.

Perhaps, after a few weeks of this project, you might go to the next level and say that the winner(s) will be the first person who solves the problem, describes its process, and then another student follows the process and solves a similar problem (which you have posted as an accompanying problem) by following the directions of the first. Kinda hard to explain, but this is something that the class would grow into. The explanation becomes something that is assessed authentically. "Was it clear enough for a classmate to use?"

Technorati Tags: bloggingbestpractice math

Image Citation:
Fabz, "Violet Ink Diagrams are Better." Fabz's Photostream. 17 Feb 2005. 18 Aug 2006 <[Click to view link]>.

Blog a Recipe for Health

Thu, 17 Aug 2006 15:41:04 GMT

Scanning the students in your classrooms reveals that one of the most important parts of their curriculum should be health and nutrition, and blogging teachers know that an excellent way to learn anything is to talk about it. So how might we get students to talk about this, no so engaging subject?

Set up coach relationships between students, so that each student has a coach and also serves as a coach for another student. Each day, ask your students to write a brief blog entry describing what they ate the day before. Then ask each students coach to read the blog of their client, and then comment, explaining the food groups, or nutrients that they need to concentrate on today, in order to maintain a balance.
Ask students to study the nutrition information from your curriculum, and specific foods that fulfill specific requirements. Then ask them to invent recipes, with ingredients and directions, that will satisfy 100% of a youngster's daily requirements. Then ask students to read each other's blogged recipes and to comment with a poem about the recipe, and it's author.

Image Citation:
Harpel, Tom. "Menu Warning." Tom Harpel's photostream. 13 Oct 2004. 17 Aug 2006 <[Click to view link]>.

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