Now that summer school is over, I’ve been working on the next class I’m teaching, which starts Monday. It’s a graduate course in educational technology and this is my first year teaching it. Over the past several months I’ve been developing the syllabus and planning each class for the three week course. The main focus of the course is not to show the teachers a bunch of cool apps, but to help them develop a methodology for working with technology that is adaptable to the ever changing tools and students we encounter.

This class is a 3 hour course that meets five days a week, so I’ve tried to make it as practical and accessible as possible. To do this, I’m administering all the course content through a wiki instead of the proprietary software used by the university. The students will be building much of the wiki themselves as they work through the class and my hope is that they’ll be comfortable enough with it to start their own during the year. For other wikis my students and I have made (wiimote wiki and resource wiki) we used wikispaces. Free wikis (without advertising) on wikispaces are only available for K-12, so I decided to check out PB Works (formerly PB Wiki). To say the least I’ve been very impressed with it. PB Works is very user friendly and powerful at the same time. There are a few features (page privacy and more robust user management) that I’m tempted to pay for, but not for the course I’m teaching now.

The wiki is a constant work in progress and I’ll be updating a lot over the weekend, but I’d love to hear any feedback from readers. You can check it out at http://tech586.pbworks.com. Feel free to look at the survey, but please refrain from filling it out or I’ll have to delete your entry because it affects one of the projects.

Since I’m planning for three hours a day, I’ve broken each class into two parts. So far I’ve gotten the first week of classes on the wiki completed and will finish the rest soon. The second week of class, the teachers/students will be teaching mini lessons and constructing the wiki pages for those classes. During the final week, we’ll be looking at some administrative issues involving technology. I’ll probably post those pages sometime next week. Even though I have all the classes planned, building all the elements of the wiki has taken some time.  Please share your feedback.

Ever since I read a watered down version of Don Quixote in my high school Spanish class, I’ve had a bit of a fascination with windmills. Should I ever win the lottery, I’d like to fund a factory that builds wind turbines :-).  For now though, I’ll have to settle on projects with my students.  In a few days we’ll be putting our measurement, construction, and problem solving skills to work on a small scale wind turbine.  One of the things we’ll be testing is how much power our little wind catcher can produce.  Today I purchased the supplies at Radio Shack (see pictures) and plan on adapting the plans from this website.

This is the third post, in what’s become a bit of a series, on some of the things I’m doing with my summer school students. In the last post, I wrote a little about authentic assessment. Here is an example of one from my summer math class.

You’d be surprised at just how much weight a single toothpick can hold. We zeroed in on the exact number during a math lab last week. Students have been working on adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing fractions, so we got out the balances and started weighing things down to fractions of a gram. The students loaded the items (rocks, quarters, lead weights) into a cup on a pair of toothpicks and kept a running tally of the weight. After a while, the cup filled up and the students ran out of items light enough to weigh on the balances.

At this point I brought out some bigger weights and we started stacking them on the toothpicks. When the toothpicks started bending we added 100 gram weights, then 50 gram weights, and so forth until it finally broke. It was hilarious to watch the students ooh and ahh everytime they added another weight. When it was all done, the students added up all the numbers and did some division to figure out how many toothpicks it would take to hold me up. The answer - 62 toothpicks.

In the movie, A Beautiful Mind, John Nash (Russell Crowe) explains the Nash Equilibrium by discussing the probability of picking up a girl at a bar. If all the guys go after one girl, he says, their probability of landing a date is low.  If they work in concert, and selectively avoid the most attractive girl, their probability of getting a favorable date increases. A friend of mine once voiced a simpler explanation,  “…you don’t go after the cheetah.”

I bring this up because of a book I’m reading about how randomness influences  our lives more than we realize.   The book, by Leonard Mlodinow, is called The Drunkard’s Walk.  In the book, Mlodinow uses a number of real world examples to explain concepts of probability and chance.  As it turns out, randomness is a rather difficult thing to manufacture, yet its presence pervades our daily lives.  The “Drunkard’s Walk” is not just a catchy title, but actually refers to a mathematical term for random motion like the “…paths molecules follow as they fly through space, incessantly bumping and being bumped by, their sister molecules.”  The problem with randomness, that Mlodinow points out, is that our brains aren’t really wired to understand it or take it into account in our decision making.  Our human brains are programmed to seek order, find patterns, and make decisions accordingly.  This programming certainly helps us learn new things, but it can also lead us to misinterpret many things in our lives.  We sometimes see patterns where there is only randomness, and interpret something as random when it actually had a high level of probability.  Factoring probability into our decision process changes one’s outlook and can be used to our advantage - like the chances of Nash and his buddies landing a date (the basis of Game Theory).

Because we aren’t wired to think this way, intuitively, it can certainly lead to errors in student assessment for teachers.  It’s a lot easier to misinterpret the results of data than you might realize, especially on multiple choice tests (i.e. - high stakes testing).  I guess this is why my grad school professors were always harping about authentic assessment.  Though results from authentic assessments can also be misinterpreted I try to incorporate them into every unit I teach.  If students can apply something they’ve learned to a real-world project, then I feel pretty comfortable that they’ve genuinely learned something.  With only a traditional assessment, students may have just gotten lucky or memorized a bunch of facts, but not really learned anything.  Does the student who got 100% on the vocabulary test really use those words in spoken or written works?

Getting lucky through a series of random events isn’t always a bad thing.  I met my wife because my chemistry lab partner in college was her roommate.  Had her roommate and I not been paired up, I doubt I would have ever pursued a “cheetah” like her :-).  More recently, while visiting my parents home in Iowa, my dad told me about the book on randomness he’d just finished.  A few days later I met my student teacher for the summer - a former engineer who decided to become a teacher.  That same day, I received an email from an alternative energy guy I’d worked with earlier in the year.  This all occurred while I’d been mulling over what to do with my summer school math class.  By the end of the day, I had it pretty well mapped out - Game Theory, Toothpick Bridges, and Wind Turbines.   Pictures to follow soon.

I am a huge fan of thatquiz.org and like to highlight some of its great tools on this blog.  Summer school is in full force now and I typically start each day with a mad minute on thatquiz.  It only takes two minutes (I use the timer function when I assign the quiz), and the kids love to get on the computers as soon as they come to class.

Beyond the basic number quizzes, it also has a lot of practice problems for other concepts.  We’re going to be building some windmills (more on that in a future post) in the coming weeks, so we started practing standard and metric measures.  After some hands on work, I wanted to quickly assess the students, so I posted a quick 10 question quiz from the measurement section on that quiz.  In it, the students put a virtual ruler next to a picture of  a fish and measure it.  The students enjoyed it and I got immediate feedback. If you’ve never used thatquiz.org, I highly suggest giving it a try.

Google forms are great, but they don’t leave you a lot of room for customization. There are some other programs that can help collect a lot of data with highly customizable forms, but they usually cost money. Today, while working on another project, I needed to find a way to make a google form go to a customized page after submitting the form. A little searching turned up this site, which gives a great tutorial on how to customize google forms.

How to style Google forms | Morning Copy via kwout

At first glance, this may seem a bit intimidating, but if you follow the steps, it’s not too bad. The one thing you’ll need to use is an html editor. I like to use nVu, but you could probably do this under the html setting on a blog. It’s mostly a matter of copying and pasting some bits of code. If you don’t know much about CSS (like me), you don’t need to worry - I didn’t change the look of the actual form. I was, however, able to direct users to a new webpage after completing the form.

This might be useful for teachers who want to steer students to a particular sight after they complete a survey. If you used a form to make a quiz, you could have it redirect to website with the answers or a site with more practice. I have a feeling that google will eventually add features to forms that make this much easier, but for now it’s a fairly straightforward solution.

If you’re looking for more, free survey alternatives, try these: Fo.reca.st (very good),  Questions Pro, Stellar Survey, and Polldaddy.  I’ve used all these for some type of survey or poll and all of them perform the same basic functions.  What’s nice about google forms is that it puts all the information into a simple spreadsheet and you can analyze all the data from there.  The other apps do offer more customization (without web hackery) and can be very useful.

I recently purchased a shirt with the quote in the title of this post at the Super Hero Supply Store in Brooklyn, NY.  The S.H.S. store sells a number of items including capes, masks, invisibility powder, and other super hero necessities.  In actuality though, the store is just a front for an after school tutoring and writing center.  All proceeds from the “super-hero supplies” fund the tutoring and writing program at the store.  The tutoring center is located behind a secret door in the store (this is one of several centers like this in cities around the country).    As a teacher and fan of all things super-hero/comic-book, the whole concept was absolutely amazing to me and the store employees made it quite an experience.  Before I could purchase my shirt (and super-hero goggles), I had to recite the “super-hero oath” to ensure that I would use my purchases for good and the pursuit of  justice.  Though I chose not to purchase a cape, I did see another person testing one out the in cape testing center.  Fortunately, I did not have to be placed in the villain verification cage.

The whole experience got me thinking about what I can do to make school a more interesting place for students.  Not that I want to turn my room into the Batcave, but I’d like to offer something that makes students really excited for school in the morning.  This has been weighing on me recently because our summer session begins next week.  This year, as in years past, I’ll have a couple groups of advanced students from grades 4-8 in math.   In the past, we’ve done everything from selling lemonade to making wiiboards to launching rockets, but that wasn’t enough to draw some of the top math students from the incoming 8th grade.  Granted, summer school for a 13/14 year old is a tough draw when competing with sports camps, X-Box, and sleeping in, but are a couple hours each morning so much to ask?  I peppered them frequently with promises of a fun project, but the pull of summer days without school proved too much.  Next year, I’ll have to start the campaign a little earlier and make summer school a can’t miss event.  It’s a lofty goal, but a good reminder to continue to keep things fresh in the year to come - to strive to be relevant, to strive to be exciting, to strive to be anything, but boring.

As the year draws to a close, it’s a great time to do some final assessments of the class and get some perspective on the year. In the past, I always did this with paper - usually a few questions at the end of a test. Unfortunately, I usually looked at the papers once and gave them back to the students or put them in a folder with the intention of analyzing them more when I got the time. The problem was, I never really found the time.

This year, I took a different approach. I’ve decided to do my end of the year surveys on Google forms. The feedback is instantaneous and the analysis is done for me and put into neat graphs automatically via the “summary” feature. The “summary feature” is one that I only discovered after several months of using Google forms. It makes analyzing your results super easy. Here is how to do it:

1. Open the spreadsheet from your survey.
2. Click on “Form” and then click “Show Summary” and you’ll get a nice set of graphs showing your results.

Here are some graphs of the responses  from the survey my 8th graders took.  There were only 11 students in the class and 2 students were gone when we took the survey.  These two questions represent some of the skills I want my students to have when they leave my class.  To get pictures of the graphs, I took a screenshot of them (Command+Shift+4 on a mac lets you take a snapshot of whatever area you highlight).

I’ve been meaning to get this taken care of for a while. Here is a quick slideshow that shows you how to embed a form onto your edublog. I also give some tips on modifying the size of the form so that it fits onto your blog page and doesn’t push everything else off to the side.

Last week, I wrote about some posts I’m planning on publishing soon as part of my Google Docs series. I’m hoping to get up the posts regarding embedding and using the sites feature of Google Apps soon, but for now, here is a project that my students did today.

The lesson

We are currently studying the properties of energy in 8th grade physical science.  As part of a series of lessons on conduction and convection, students had a competition to see who could build a box that would keep an ice cube cold the longest.  I gave them a bunch of materials from fiberglass insulation to saran wrap and they got 2 class periods to design and build their box.

The lab report

Students completed their lab report as a presentation on Google Docs.  A presentation is much easier for students to collaborate on because each student can work on a separate slide within the same presentation.  Before students were  allowed to use the computer, they had to complete a written outline of what would go in each slide.  From there, one partner took half the slides and the other partner took the rest.  The pictures of the “ice boxes” were taken during the initial experiment and uploaded to a class picasa account.  From there students could download or link to any picture of their project for the lab report.

Good things

• Each student could work at his own pace.  Once one group member finished his slides, he didn’t need to wait for the other partner to finish.  If the other partner didn’t finish during our computer lab time, he could access the presentation on any computer inside or outside school to finish it.

• Students could see what their partner was doing when they were working on it at the same time.  It helps keep kids stay on task and moving at a decent pace.

• It’s shared with me easily and I can keep track of what each student did via the revision history.

Things to look out for

• Make sure that only one person in the group starts the presentation, makes the appropriate number of slides, and then shares it with his partners.  Otherwise, everyone starts a different presentation on their own account or starts adding or deleting slides on the shared presentation.  Having one person start it, then share it (with the appropriate number of slides) takes care of this.

• Sometimes students can’t figure out how to get rid of the “put content here” boxes on pre-formatted slides.  They are easy to delete, but sometimes it’s just easier to start with blank slides and add content accordingly.

Sample Student Project (minus pictures)