Class Poem on Padlet

Just recently, while attending the Fall CUE conference at American Canyon High School, I learned about a neat tech tool called padlet.  This website allows a teacher to create a digital posterboard for the classroom.  This way, your poster (created by you or, in this case by my students) can stay forever as part of their digital portfolio instead of disappearing from my limited wall space during the next unit.

I'm pleased to share what my class came up with today as part of our unit on Cultural Identity.

Our Class Poem

Enjoy.

Donor's Choose Project -- 3 new chromebooks

Well, in all my free time I've created a Donor's Choose project to augment the technology in my classroom.  My students really need to be able to create, compose, and publish on the internet.  I would like to have a class blog for some of our literature responses and argumentative assignments next year and my students this year (2013-2014) wanted to as well.

Our hold up was, well it was mostly due to planning time on my part since it was my first year at this school.  I'd like to blame the equipment, but that's not the full picture.  We could have done most of what I want to do--writing, drafting, collaborative revision, commenting, etc.--with my current technology setup; however, it would have been slow to say the least.

We currently have 3 classroom computers to use, a fourth one if I can free up a shared laptop for the day.  Even with my reduced class sizes I had 12 students in my largest classes and that would still take 4 rotations to get all the students on to computers for typing.  While that's ok for shorter writing assignments or surveys (see my previous post, the data for which I gathered using two of our computers hot-seat style after exams), it is tedious for research papers or longer assignments when the needs of my students require that some of them are typing for two or three times as long as other students.

Donor's Choose only lets you start out with a small project at first until you get enough "points" to allow a larger dollar amount for your projects.  This, I assume, weeds out the weaker hearts, and indeed kept me out last year when I created the account and drafted half a similar project for my last classroom. Even with this small number of points--and therefore a small "budget"--I am able to fund a huge boost in capacity for my classroom:  Three Chrome book laptops for my room will double the available number of screens for students to use and cut in half the time it takes for computer projects in the room.  Not to mention the classroom management impact!  Easier planning for me, I hope.

Upon the successful funding of this project, I believe I will be able easily to plan and implement some engaging and fun lessons with our new English curriculum which will cover Antigone and Things Fall Apart next year.  Look for a class blog on here and, at the very least, some published student examples of peer edited and revised, polished, college prep writing.

Here's the link to my teacher page on Donor's Choose:  Link
Yes, it's the same as above--I'm trying the best I can since the project expires in 4 months.

Class Feedback Results

To follow Larry Ferlazzo's example, I'm posting my class feedback results from my end of year suvey. I'll put the questions followed by the highest percentage rating, just to save typing since I don't want to take the time to screen shot the charts and graphs that google forms made for me.

 I didn't split these by class period or anything, although I think for next year I'll take the trouble to make a different form for separate classes to get a better idea. This will be really important for me next year since I'll be co-teaching with two different teachers and teaching 4 different subjects. I'm excited for the challenge.

• I felt challenged by this class: 41% neutral
• I felt like Mr. Hyland respected me: 46% agree
• I felt like Mr. Hyland gave me useful feedback: 70% agree
• I felt like Mr. Hyland was fair: 63% agree
• Mr. Hyland had high expectations of me: 50% agree
• I tried my hardest to do my best in class: 37% each (tie) strongly agree and agree
• My grades reflected the quality of my work: 52% agree
• Mr. Hyland encouraged me to do my best: 43% agree
• I felt safe in Mr. Hyland's class: 54% agree
• The class was well organized: 59% agree
• I enjoyed being in this class: 41% agree
• I always followed Mr. Hyland's instructions: 41% neutral

 I also had 5 short answer questions where students could type a response. Some did not, and others made what seemed like sarcastic comments (hard to tell if they were serious). However, there are some gold nuggets that told me what I needed to hear from students (that's the point after all!). Many of these comments referred to our penultimate activity--watching Star Wars after a series of lessons on the Hero's Journey, so if you follow the link below and scan those comments, you'll note some fanboys.

 I also co-teach one period, so I included my co-teacher and co-teach class on the questionnaire. You'll see her name in there as well. Here's the link to my full results, and--as un-scientific as they are--I'm proud of them this year. I always have plenty of room to improve. My goals for next year include inching forward on tech integration in my classroom lessons.

Hero's Journey Lessons Reflection, Pt. 1

It's no secret to my students that I enjoy Star Wars in almost every way.  I'm surprised these last few years at how many students have not seen the original episodes.  This year, the majority of my 3rd period English 11 P class had not seen any versions of Star Wars--which surprises me since Episode III came out in 2005 (and the Clone Wars cartoon just barely ended!)

My third period co-teacher (@jenilola)originally came up with the idea to do a Star Wars week of mini-lessons to cover the Hero's Journey--mostly since so many had not seen the movies.  She had some Hero's Journey lessons archived and we pulled those out to dust off for the end of May.  I immediately decided to steal the lessons we crafted for my other 10th grade classes.

Long story short, we ended up not having the time in the year to do Star Wars or Hero's Journey in 3rd period, and lucky for me, I've squeezed it in for my other classes.  Due to some last minute training days that will keep me out of the classroom for three straight days, I had to split up the Hero's Journey mini-lessons and it only seemed natural to split them into Act I, Act II, and Act III of the quest.

On day 1, I showed a very brief power point slide show (thanks to mythologyteacher.com [I only showed Act I up to the threshold, so as to not get ahead of myself!]) of the different scenes in Lion King that correspond to the "Departure" portion of the Hero's Journey up to the first threshold.  I then passed out index cards with stories and movies where I knew the plots (and hoped the students would know at least one! -- turns out none of the 10th graders have seen Planes. ..).  I randomly passed out cards, but let them swap until they had one they knew well.  For three absent students, I later gave them the entire stack and let them pick the one they knew best, so we had some duplicates but that's ok.  The students spent about 10 minutes filling out a chart with the generic steps of Act I "Departure" with the corresponding parts of their selected plot line.

This is where the magic happened; since, when the students could not remember a part of their plot, they had some serious questions for their classmates.  "What was the 'talisman' for Po in Kung Fu Panda?" "It was the Dragon Scroll, duh!" "Wait, why?"  This followed by an explanation (with no help from me in most cases) as to why the object in question fit the archetype it was supposed to fill.

We also heard some discussion as to why Twilight did not fit so easily into this structure.  For a few extra credit points, I assigned the kids who wanted a challenge to complete Finding Nemo with the dad as the hero and one to work with Nemo as the hero.  Another student chose to do Star Wars Episode IV with C3PO as the hero (real fun and much challenge since his quest has a short cycle within Luke's hour-long departure sequence).

Despite me delivering a canned power point lecture for the first 7 minutes of class and then immediately passing out a fill-in-the-box worksheet, students had some higher level thinking and two-way conversations about their hero characters.  Of course, because we had to split the days of May up between other curriculum, we only talked about Act I and the departure of the hero, so there was not much discussion about how characters changed and why they had to take certain actions or make certain choices.

If these weren't mini lessons, I would next want to have them produce one high-quality poster (gotta love posters, plus I need something on my walls for back to school night next Fall!) for 2 or 3 of the key steps--perhaps one showing all the "guardians of the thresholds" from all the 12 different films and stories they broke apart.

Did I mention that I moved all the desks around in my room? Mostly to get them off the walls so that students could then post their Hero Journey plot points around the room.  Sadly, we ran out of time (mini lessons, a blessing and curse!) before I could have students present their Act I lists or gallery walk the room and discuss.  Never fear, however, since the desks ended up in a large circle and we had plenty of top-quality discussion before the sticky notes finally went up.