Wednesday, October 17, 2007

OK. I have 15 minutes to blog...

I feel rather guilty that I have not been blogging as much as I would like. So much to do and so little time. Now that the K12online is live and ticking I would like to see as much of it as possible.

A nasty thing gets in the way.... that "job" thing. Hmm how to do both.

How about some Fosnot!

Speaking about the job my students finally finished the first unit of thier Fosnot adventure. They have created some amazing work and will be doing a growing post soon on what they have created.

I still am having trouble not being the center of attention in the classroom. I love the spotlight and a chance to captivate an audience. Now my role is taffy puller.... getting that important information out of the students head to give them ownership of their knowledge.

My mentor at school keeps telling me as he draws a turtle on the board "slow learning". Sometimes it is so frustrating with the silence. I will have to continue to find the right "questions"or conversation bridges to continue the math chatter in the class.

The timeline in the book said 10 lessons. My students needed many more lessons than in the book's outline. Most one day activities were 2 day activities to allow for completion of assignments. By the end of the unit the students were getting more efficient at their learning. They were talking more at the onset of lessons and expressing the math that had been learned the previous day. Finally some progress. Hmm it can be hard to reprogram students to be the one mashing up the knowledge instead of mirroring it. (thank you Mr. Warlick)
I have used the blog to get the kids to comment on what has happened in school that day. I am up to 50 to 60% of them commenting regularly. This shows promise for assignments to come.

About thier blogs

These are raw "blogging" students. They need to be taught the inner workings of the blog. How to post, how to embed how to ..... you get the picture. I never had thought about using "Growing Posts" to teach all of these blogging necessities to students. But the Growing Post seems to be the tool that fits the bill.


I look forward to showing them voicethread, and bubbleshare to be tools that they can use to illustrate ideas in their growing post.

Next Fosnot Unit next week. The scribes will begin. Houray. Onward 21st century learners...

Ding time is up. Time to create a Growing Post.

1 comment:

Greg Sawatzky said...

Ok I'm starting Fosnot Tomorrow. I was stumbling around in stats and prob (way to long). Your blog has been good for me to prepare for. I too am worried about getting the kids to do the slogging. I thought the last unit would help them prepare for it. I think some will have have a hard time to adjust and just wait for someone to tell them in "invert and multiply"

Spent some time last week getting them to think about making the investigation procedure more effective. Heck we even did a "What will it LOOK like and SOUND Like T-chart.

I also will be using the first few investigations to evaluate the engagement process. Hope this will get them going. I'm diving in to the cat food investigation.

What did you do for homework? Was it all journalling?