Category: Students

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Visual Literacy: How Do Your Students Share Their Thinking?

The perceived audience / purpose for most student work is the teacher / because it was assigned. Learning becomes more meaningful when students are given chances to share their thinking with more authenticity. It's as simple as adding an audience to an assignment. Example: "How would you explain your solution to younger students?" This also opens the door to more relevant self evaluation. "Did my presentation suit my audience and purpose?"

Periodic-table
Visual literacy is the ability to evaluate, apply, or create conceptual visual representations. Visual-Literacy.org has assembled a collection of visualizations in as a periodic table. Mouse over each element and a sample pops up. The examples range from simple to complex and they provide a vast array of approaches beyond the overused Venn diagram or T-chart. 

A pdf of the table is also available. On another page you can group the visualization methods by your criteria and  find background information for a specific visualization method via Google Images and Wikipedia
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Teaching American History Grant – The Student as Historian

This week I traveled to Waco TX where I conducted two days of training for an ESC Region 12 "Teaching American History" grant.  I had the chance to work with 5th, 8th and 11th grade teachers on techniques to move the focus of history instruction to document-based instruction. I used resources from my website "Teaching with Documents" and a variety of web 2.0 tools to help teachers see how they can create learning environments that allow students to do the work of the historian. On our second day, teachers used mobile laptops to develop their DBQ's and try out the various web resources.

The response from teachers was very positive. They wrote.

The best part of the workshop is that we had time to practice and digest the information were were using.

A good "kick in the pants" on some big picture ideas.

Made me revisit my own strategies…. Questioning strategies were repeatedly reinforced.

My head is spinning and I am giddy from all the resources and insights.

I need to reevaluate the way I teach. You gave me a lot to think about. 

Got me excited about what I'm going to do next in my classroom.

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Look into the Face of Student Engagement

It's easy for teachers to feel like their students are far too distracted by the many glowing screens that light up their lives.  Robbie Cooper, a photographer and video artist, explores the impact of these information screens in his new "Immersion" project.  It offers a fascinating look directly into the faces of British and American kids playing video games (with varying levels of violence) – including Halo 3, Call of Duty, GTA 4, Tekken and Star Wars Battlefront. Cooper uses a system that stations a high resolution video camera right behind the projected game screen.

Immersion
It's painful to look into the faces of students so caught up in the (sometimes) violent world of video games. I wonder if the students are attracted to the violence or the fact that video games create environments that provide them with an engaging mix of interaction, feedback, and information control?  View more project still images here.

He has edited some of his material into this short video. 

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Fostering Creativity

idea festival
idea festival

Creating is Bloom’s highest level of thinking. Creating is not limited to “the creative.” We all create when we make new combinations of existing elements. Someone put wheels on the bottom of a scaled-down surfboard and created the skateboard. And so it goes…

While teachers and students are constrained by mind-numbing test prep, the rest of society is working overtime to foster creative connections. In September the annual “IdeaFestival” was held in Louisville, KY. It brings together creative thinkers from different disciplines to connect ideas in science, the arts, design, business, film, technology and education. The festival motto – “If it can possibly go together, it comes together here.” Why not apply that perspective in our schools?

Here are some suggestions from the festival on how to come up with new ideas. Many can be easily adapted to help our students discover their creative potential in the classroom.

1. Think when you are not thinking, for example, on a run or walk.
2. Listen to classical music, go to a concert or a play or sit quietly in a park to daydream.
3. Read periodicals you would not typically read — a scientific magazine, for example, if you are more interested in business. Same with books outside your typical genre.
4. Attend a conference outside your field.
5. Surround yourself with creative thinkers.
6. Immerse yourself in a problem; ask questions, investigate possible outcomes.
7. Keep an idea journal.
8. Take a course to learn a new language or some other skill outside your expertise.
9. Be curious and experiment.
10. Articulate your idea, seek feedback, put structure on it, harvest it.
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Your Students Will Never Be Late for Class Again

Like all teachers, I struggled for years with tardy students – “But Mr. Pappas, I had to stop at my locker!” Then I took a lesson from fellow teacher – Tom O’Brien, the art teacher in the classroom next door. Tom had it figured out, and here’s what he taught me.

Stand at the door between classes and greet each individual student by name with a handshake as they walk in the room. It guarantees that every day you’ll have a positive connection with every one of your students. Student having a bad day?  Find our before they act out in class.  When the bell rings, the door closes and you promptly begin class. Students quickly realize if they are late, they don’t get a personal greeting. Try it  – it works!

image credit flickr/Earls37a