Classroom Tech, Part IV: Shelfari

A snippet of my "Books I've Read" shelf, complete with ratings

I’m in the middle of  a series of posts outlining how I plan on using technology during the coming school year. I’ll share some tools, resources, and ideas that I intend to use with students in the classroom, and hopefully you, the reader, will share some advice or thoughts of your own, either in the comments section, or on your own blog (just let me know if you do!).

Unlike the other tools mentioned in the previous three posts, Shelfari is not something I am just now starting to use with students. I’ve used Shelfari with my students for a year and a half now, with a mixed bag of success, and I’ve posted before on what it is and on some of my experiences with Shelfari. All told, it’s been a great tool, and my experiences using it with classes have yielded a couple of strategies to make it more effective.

• I primarily use Shelfari in my English classes as a way for students to document their outside reading. To do this, I ask that they write a book review (which includes both summary and evaluation) on Shelfari. From a management standpoint, the most effective way for me to grade this is to create a group for each class period and work through each class separately. This is really nice because I can stay up to date on what kids are reading, they can recommend books to me or their peers, and their reviews can be read by anyone on the website.
• Shelfari would also be a great resource for students who are looking for books to read, particularly if you’ve been using class groups. They could use other students’ shelves and reviews to find books that they might be interested in. This could also include an added writing component in which students have to explain why they selected the book that they did, encouraging them to use some metacognition and think about the criteria that they used to select that book.
• There are numerous other groups on Shelfari that students could be encouraged to join, many focused on a particular literary interest such as a genre, title, or author. Students could interact with other Shelfari users in these groups and hear from like-minded people. There is an obvious safety concern here, as we don’t know who students are interacting with, so that is something that would have to be discussed thoroughly before encouraging this activity.
• One oft-neglected feature of Shelfari is the “on loan” check box for individual books. Say you keep an inventory of all your books on Shelfari. If a student borrows or checks out a book from you, you can find that book on your shelf and go to the details page. Under the “Editions” tab, there is a check box that says “loaned to a friend.” If you check that box, you can fill in the information – who you loaned it to and when – and save that until the book is returned. While I do wish it was a little easier to access this feature, it’s pretty handy nonetheless.
• I often use the Wish List shelf to keep a list of books that I’m interested in reading. This might be a really great way for students to build up some interest in a variety of books and let you see the kinds of books they want to read. This opens the door for recommendations, reviews, and other great interaction. You might even make it an assignment to add 2 books from different genres that the student is going to read. One additional benefit to doing this: if students have a list of books they want to read on their Wish List, they should never be telling you they don’t have a book to read.

These are just a few of, I’m sure, innumerable ideas for using Shelfari in the classroom. Unlike some of the previous tech tools, I can say with complete confidence that most students – particularly young adults – enjoy using Shelfari. They laugh and make fun of it early on, but once they start getting into the different possibilities (particularly interacting with their friends), they really do start to engage a little bit more.

Next up in the Classroom Tech series (Part V) will be an oldie, but a goodie: PowerPoint.

Six Great Ideas – Journal 2

“Six Great Ideas,” by Mortimer J. Adler – Chs. 3-4

QUOTES:

• “Precisely because it can be everybody’s business, it should be part of everyone’s general education…Only by the presence of philosophy in the general schooling of all is everyone prepared to discharge the obligations common to all because all are human beings. Schooling is essentially humanistic only to the extent that it is tinged with philosophy-with an introduction to the great ideas.”
• “If philosophy is everybody’s business, then not only should everyone be able to use these words correctly in a sentence when the standard of correctness is merely grammatical, but also everyone should be able to engage, to some extent, in intelligent discourse about the object of thought under consideration.”
• “These three ideas [liberty, equality, and justice] are the ones we live by in society. They represent ideas which a considerable portion of the human race has sought to realize for themselves and for posterity.”
• “I turn now to the other trio: truth, goodness, and beauty. These three ideas are the ones we judge by. Unlike the ideas we live by (liberty, equality, and justice), these three function for us in our private as well as in our public life.”
• “A great idea is almost always one about which challenging questions have been raised. The great philosophical questions are, for the most parts, questions about the great ideas.

THOUGHTS:

• On the first quote: I’m encouraged that Adler seems to agree with me (or is it vice versa?) that philosophy should be a required part of the K-12 curriculum. I learned more Thinking Skills and Habits of Mind in my philosophy courses than in all the rest of my education combined. It is utterly necessary to develop such skills just to read philosophy texts, let alone discuss them or write about them. And there is plenty of precedent for the success of philosophy in high schools – look at the International Baccalaureate program, which offers credit for philosophy.
• Following a discussion on vocabulary and the observation that the six ideas he will discuss are truly simple words, Adler notes something interesting: that the words are simple grammatically, but very complex and layered as “objects of thought.” This seems to be true of so many different words – easy to learn how to use them, but difficult to truly understand what they mean.
• As Adler concludes the introductory section of the book, he previews his discussion of the two groups of great ideas: the judging ideas (truth, beauty, goodness) and the acting ideas (liberty, equality, justice). Of these, he says that the greater set is actually the former. Truth, beauty, and goodness, according to Adler, are the dominant trio of ideas because they affect the acting ideas. For example, without a concept of goodness, ideas like liberty and equality and justice are just objects of thought. It is the notion that they are good ideas that makes them so valuable to us. Not surprisingly, this is very similar to Plato’s theory that the Form of the Good is the highest of the forms and illuminates all other ideas.
• On the last quote above, it reminds me of one of my favorite truths about philosophy: Doubt everything. Doubt leads to questions. Questions lead to answers. Answers lead to truth. Without some sort of honest doubt, no great theory (or idea) would ever have been posited. If Martin Luther King, Jr. hadn’t doubted the goodness of segregation, the world would have been a much different place. This is why I continue to advocate doubt as one of the strongest habits of mind (even if it doesn’t get mentioned as such).

Using Wordles in the Classroom

A while back, I discovered a really great site: Wordle. I have since mentioned it a couple of times on the blog.

Since discovering it, I’ve been trying to find ways to introduce it into the classroom, and have had trouble finding uses that truly enhance learning. Probably the best strategy is to paste the text of a story we read in class into Wordle and using it to preview the story. This has really helped to pull out the key words, which is particularly useful when the story has unfamiliar terms. For example, in the Wordle above (from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”), key terms like amontillado, catacombs, flambeaux, recess, and nitre pop up. This tells the students that the word is going to be frequently encountered, so they ask what it means. This way, when we actually get into the story they (hopefully) know what the word means.

Apart from this idea, however, I’ve struggled to find ways to use Wordle in my 9th grade English classroom. As always, I pose you that question: how do you use Wordle in your classes?

Virtual Whiteboards

One of my colleagues got me interested in a fairly new web 2.0 technology: virtual whiteboards. Imagine sitting in a room full of people, all of whom have a marker. Together they all make changes to a plan or illustration, add comments, etc., and all on the big whiteboard at the front of the room. Now give that picture a web 2.0 spin – a site where any group of people can get together and mark up ideas, documents, and/or pictures with insightful comments, helpful pointers, or even just silly little mustaches. This is a virtual whiteboard. Virtual whiteboards combine the best element of wikis (collaboration) and the best element of chat rooms (real time conversations).

Of the several that I’ve tried, probably the best to date is called Twiddla. I found the link via the great people over at ReadWriteWeb. What’s so useful about Twiddla is that, unlike other Whiteboard sites, Twiddla allows you to surf the web within the site and collaboratively mark up websites. Similarly, you can upload images or documents (Word, Excel, and PDF files), insert mathematical formulas, even open your email, and use Twiddla’s features to mark up the medium of your choice.

I can see a lot of great uses for this technology in the classroom:

• Virtual study sessions for just about any subject area – English, Math, Social Studies, Science, Foreign language, health, you name it
• Group editing a classmate’s (or teacher’s) writing
• Getting feedback on the design of a class website or blog
• Visually demonstrating reading skills, like using context clues to understand vocabulary
• Visually demonstrating writing skills like paragraphing or editing
• Visually demonstrating research skills, such as identifying site authors or using topic headers in Wikipedia
• Playing tic-tac-toe

OK, so maybe the last one isn’t totally “educational,” but you get the idea. Twiddla has the potential to be an impressive classroom tool that I’m already finding ways to use in my classroom. Now if only I had a classroom full of laptops…

A Quick Review

Still trying to force myself to make time to post more regularly during my planning period. I think once I get into a routine during plan periods, it will help: update website, respond to parent emails, post, plan. Seems simple enough…

That said, here’s a quick summary of the first couple weeks of the 2008-2009 school year:

1. So far, we’ve read two stories: “The Most Dangerous Game,” by Richard Connell, and “Gaston,” by William Saroyan. The first story we read as a sort of warm-up in marking and annotating a text. “Gaston” we read with the end goal of having our first Shared Inquiry discussion (putting that summer training to use). After about a 20-25 minute discussion in each class, I was moderately pleased with the results. I felt like the discussions were pretty good, even with a couple of my very quiet classes. I really like being able to focus on a good story and draw out some ideas and themes that are applicable to students’ lives. The students generally seemed to like the discussions as well. Was it a life-changing experience? Not really, but it went better than any literature discussions we had last year. Next up: Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron,” and Sherman Alexie’s “Indian Education.”

2. Our current writing unit (I’ve been splitting our block periods in half to get more writing instruction into my classes), is borrowed directly from Write Beside Them - we’re using her “snapshot moment” assignment. To get students going quickly, I asked them to write about their scariest moment. Our main focus with this particular assignment is to work on getting a lot of detail and elaboration into the writing – hopefully leading to better elaboration in the narrative essays they’ll write next. So far so good – most students seem to like the assignment (as much as they like writing, anyway). As mentioned in the previous post, however, my biggest challenge is trying to keep students engaged in something purposeful while I’m conferencing with students. Suggestions for this are, as always, most welcome.

3. Our technology teacher leader team has been busy already. Many of us have been helping other teachers with their technology problems and have helped some teachers find new ways to use technology in the classroom. As a building, we are also moving forward, slowly moving away from the old desktop computers and overhead projectors and making sure we’re all using the tools (ELMOs and laptops) the taxpayers blessed us with. Obviously there are always user issues with that sort of change – learning how to use new technology and a fear of change only a couple of examples - but I’ve been impressed with the willingness of our teachers (and administrators) to see this change as a challenge and as an opportunity to continue learning.

4. Football is a time-consuming sport to coach. Along with daily practices and weekly games, we’ve spent some serious time discussing personnel, watching game film, putting together scouting reports and game plans, and scouting games for the varsity. And that’s just at the 9th grade level. But coaching football has already been an incredibly rewarding experience. I’ve learned a lot, not only about football, but about coaching and teaching in general.

All in all, a nice start to the year. Now if only I could get posting about other stuff more regularly…