Class Overview

These past 8 weeks have flown by! We had the opportunity to create a digital story from start to finish including steps for brainstorming, writing a script, making a storyboard, and finally making the video. It is actually a project I am starting with my students right now. They are creating one on their favorite part of their summer. This project gave me a great insight into how to lay it out and set up the final project. I'm excited to see how theirs turns out. 

I really enjoyed working on the info graphic. I chose to make one on the Cardinals, something fun to me. I did experience quite a bit of trouble with it though. I couldn't get any of the programs suggested to work. That's when my husband came to the rescue. He makes info graphics all the time as part of his job. So he helped me learn a little bit of Photoshop and InDesign to create my final project. I have to say it ended up being a blast and I loved finding information to put in there. 

I think I would have liked to learn one more type of project we could use. I had already gotten a feel for digital stories from a previous class, so that being spread out over a few weeks felt like it drug by. I did like the convenience of that though :) 

Overall, I really enjoyed this class and getting more opportunities to be hands on with a few more tools!

Infographic

For my info graphic, I did 10 things you may not know about the St. Louis Cardinals. It was really fun finding these things and learning more about the best team in baseball!

Digital Story

We took an amazing vacation this summer to Disneyworld! We had an excellent time. Watch the video to see how it was!

Digital Storytelling vs. The Writing Process

Time4Writing lists five steps to the writing process: pre-writing, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. In my previous English classes, I remember the teacher specifically taking us through each of these steps to help us achieve the best work possible. It helped map out our thoughts and narrow down what we were going to write about. The writing process is used in writing essays, short stories, or just paragraph writing. Anytime you want to get a story or thoughts onto paper in a professional manor, following the steps in the writing process is beneficial.

Digital Storytelling is very similar. As we've been working on this digital story over the past couple of weeks, we are going through each of these steps. We started out by brainstorming about what topics we would like to tell our story about. We then wrote out a draft of what we would include in our story. This week we are doing peer reviews with others' stories. We are giving feedback to what they are going to include in their story. We are then going to make a storyboard for the actual things/pictures we will include and what we will say in the story. Finally we will make our story and publish the final product.

So you can see how similar these two are. The main difference is one is in video story form and the other is in writing. Throughout this digital story project, I've really had fun mapping out my recent vacation to Disneyworld. It's been fun laying out pictures and putting them in video form. It's a new and different way to present a story instead of just writing. It makes the writing more fun.

As a math teacher, I'm always looking for ways to use this in my classroom. How would you see this working in a math class?

Making my Website Useful

Many teachers have a classroom website with varying levels of success. How have you made your classroom website more useful to students, families, and other educators? What gaps still remain? 

I made my classroom website 2 years ago when I started teaching at St. James Middle School. When I first made it, it was really just a place to post announcement, special dates, helpful websites, and had a place to contact me. It wasn't very successful. I would assume most parents didn't even know I had a website. I told my students about it in class, but most of them didn't take advantage of it. After all, it didn't have much to offer!

This past year I included a page where I posted videos. I had just learned what a flipped classroom was. I decided to use it as a place where students and parents could go to view the lesson we had that day. I got an amazing reaction from parents and students alike. They loved getting to have the extra help when they got home to work on their homework. Parents loved being able to help their children. They knew what was expected of them. I feel like it was an amazing leap for my website. Now that I have more parents looking at my site, I also have more parent and student contact through the site.

One thing that is still lacking from my site that I want to incorporate is a blog or discussion board. I really want my students to participate in discussions this coming year. I am still trying to work that out and figure out how to use a discussion board in a math class. Any ideas?

Incorporating Literacy in a Middle School Math Class

When I first started teaching, I thought literacy and math were two separate entities. They have nothing to do with each other. But now that I have completed my fourth year of teaching, I am starting to see how hand in hand they can be. There are so many things I can be doing in my own classroom to help the ELA teachers. 

One easy thing I can do is have a word wall displaying all of the new vocabulary words we've learned throughout the year. I also have my students have a glossary in their binders to keep definitions of these words. But incorporating literacy in my class is so much more than a word wall. 

As we have started incorporating the Missouri Learning Standards, the students are being asked to provide more detailed explanations of their work. This past year I started having my students answer the question of how they would solve the problem and not necessarily have them work it out. For example, explain how you would solve the equation 3x - 7 + 4x = 14. I used questions like these as exit slips for my students. That way I could easily tell if they understood the process. For my lower reading students, I would have them explain it to me in words instead of having them write it out. I have found that by having students explain how to work a problem, their understanding of that topic increases. We also use the Kagan structure 'Sage n Scribe' to explain processes to their partner.

This past school year our building also incorporated using a method called RACE for writing answers. R-Restate the Question; A-Answer the Question; C-Cite the Evidence; E-Explain and Extend. It has definitely improved the writing of our students. We have posters of it in every classroom, including my math class. Mainly we just use the R and A. If it's a word problem, we can incorporate the C, but we have found that it's hard to get the E in the answer. 

By incorporating literacy in my math class, I am not only teaching math but connections to other subjects as well as life. What other ways do you see literacy being incorporated in a math classroom?

Comparing/Contrasting Wikis

The first wiki I found was priestsic6.wikispaces.com. It is a 6^th grade class wiki. The wiki's set up is very easy to navigate. The teacher has a page for each subject area. When I looked at the Literacy page, it was all about poetry. What I found very neat was the fact that she gave the first 2 lines of a poem, then the student added 2 lines of their own. I love that she added pictures of her own classroom. All through the page you see students' works of poetry and literacy.

The second wiki I looked at was a collaborative storytelling wiki where students in grades 3 and 4 got creative and completed a story about a tennis ball (terrythetennisball.wikispaces.com). This wiki showed the creativeness of the students while still keeping them in the parameter of a specific assignment.

Both wikis had students adding onto a story/poem. It shows their creativity and allows them to work together collaboratively to reach a completed story/poem. The wiki about the tennis ball was for younger students. They didn't have full reign of how the story went. They clicked on certain options, then when it came time to add a line or conversation, they were able to add it. The wiki about poetry was for middle school students. They were to build on the previous person's lines to continue the poem.