NEW FAVORITE RESOURCE *SQUEE*

In case I haven’t made it clear yet, I just love it when nerd-ism and good pedagogy come together. Today, they have come together in the form of Big Huge Lab’s Trading Card generator.  I found this as part of my T3 Making Technology School Readiness training (more about that eventually, if I can take the time from training to reflect on it).  The trading card generator lets you upload a picture, include some text, and select some presets (including some logo stuff), and it will generate a Magic: the Gathering-style playing card.  I’m having really nerdy ideas about how to use this faster than I can type them out.

Image: Don Quijote y Sancho Panza by Pablo Picasso, I don't remember where I got it.  Bad citation. Text from "El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha," by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. 

For content: Create a deck of cards for:
Characters in a story
Important people (Artist series, Author series, Musician series, Scientist series, Politician series).  Especially entertaining to pass one of these out per student per day during Hispanic Heritage Month, or on other special occasions.
Countries--pick the qualities in the description with some care

Student-created cards:
Have artsy students draw pictures of characters or other important elements.  Have write-ey students write out descriptions of characters.  Upload all of this to a common source.  Have students create custom decks for reference during stories.

In-class activities:
Have a blind draw or a trading session.  Give some kind of reward for completing sets.

Classroom management:
Use in parallel with, supplementing, or instead of a badge system.
Have students pose for pictures for common school or class tasks.  Issue cards when other students are doing the same thing.  (This is problematic for a bunch of reasons.)
Use the school or class currency to buy “booster packs.”
Student-created decks describing actions or characters or events, a la MtG.
Can I actually create a whole game mechanic, or steal a deck-building game mechanic, to staple on to this?

Really, this is going to be a thing quickly. I’m going to have to look into printing costs, or possibly into writing an app that lets students collect virtual cards.  Or possibly it’s one of the gamification things I get really excited about and then totally fizzles, as it takes too much time and nobody’s as excited about it as I am. 

On a tangentially related note, also as part of this training, I found out that Moodle has badges enabled, so now I have to get into that.  Our teacher websites are on a SchoolWires platform called Centricity 2; I wonder if they can do badges?

PD Big Huge Labs has a Badge generator!  Ooh!  Ooh!  That’s it; I’m taking the next week off.

"So, what do you do in Spanish class?" (2 of 2)

Different kinds of activities and their educational value

This is a messy kind of post.  It's the blog post equivalent of tearing everything out of your closet and shelves and throwing it in heaps on your bed and on the floor, as you install a new closet shelving system and re-organize everything you've just been cramming anywhere they'd fit for the last 3 1/2 years.

The heaps I'm going to try to throw things in look like this:
A.)  Kind of activity.  These, hopefully, will be broad descriptions of the sorts of things we do in Spanish class.  Refinements to come as necessary.
B.)  Chunk, chew, or check?  Are these activities' primary value as a tool for presenting new information (chunk), as a way of processing or practicing information (chew), or as an assessment tool (check)?  This is directly from Kathleen Kryza's work on co-teaching (and, indirectly, differentiated instruction) with our ISD, and thus probably from one of the several books written by Kryza, Duncan, and Stevens.
C.) Outcome, engagement, and materials.  These are 3 of the 6 qualities from the last blog post.  The others are less activity-specific, so I shouldn't need to include them for each activity.

A.) PAIRED and SMALL-GROUP SPEAKING ACTIVITIES.  Examples: Information-gap activities, interviews, ask-and-answer sessions, etc.
Initial thoughts:  This is the kind of activity where my thinking most needs clarification.  I do these spontaneously all the time, and so they're probably the least structured.
B.) Chew [check].  Done with each other, they're definitely chew activities.  So they require some prep work first; namely, how and why to say what they're to be saying.
C.)  Outcome:  Students will have the experience of performing the communicative task.  In addition, some will result in new content knowledge, others will have a written element to them.  In the tasks that have no written or drawn component, an oral checkout of some kind becomes necessary.
Engagement:  Students are speaking in Spanish, trying out new words, asking questions, writing information as it becomes available or necessary.
Materials:  Teacher-provided handouts, self-generated information, paper, pencil, etc.

2A.) WRITING CONVERSATIONS.  Examples--passing notes, threaded on-line discussions (i.e., Moodle), instant messaging, text messages. 
Initial thoughts:  I have never, to my shame, done one of the technologically based activities.  The reasons for this include a lot of bad reasons involving time management and my capacity for building online classes. 
B.)  Chew (check).  Just like spoken conversations, these are mostly a chance for students to mount up on their new vocabulary and take it out for a test drive.  It can also be used as a formative assessment--I would hesitate to use it as a summative assessment, though.


More of this in a future post.  I know it says 2 of 2 in the title, and need to be getting on with my day, but I'm not done with the topic, so more to come.

"So, what do you do in Spanish class?" (1 of 2)

Categories of classroom activities

At the last MiBLSi conference I went to--actually a coaches' meeting, which I wouldn't normally attend--some of the local experts shared a lot of techniques on how to work with our peers on classroom management techniques.  The title of the meeting was probably something like "Coaching teachers," in fact.  At the meeting, one of the tools they shared was a "classroom behavior" matrix.  It looks just like the school-wide behavior matrix, but instead of different locations, the up-and-down categories are different kinds of classroom activities.  (If I can find the example they showed online, and I figure out how to cite it properly, I'll try to post it here.)

Doing this had only begun to start to commence to consider crossing my mind at the end of August.  At that time, I resisted the idea--"we do SO MANY different types of activities in Spanish class," I told myself, "that putting them into few enough categories to be meaningful would be impossible."  Then, I ran out of prep time (read: summer vacation) and started teaching again.  The idea was quickly forgotten--"besides," I thought, "I have a whole summer planning and practicing an improved version of my classroom management system; surely this year will be better than last year."


Well, fair enough, but when the idea of a classroom activity behavior matrix came up again, I was supremely intrigued.  But what sort of categories would classroom activities fit into?  How do you take all of the multiple intelligences, and varied interests, and differentiated levels of activities, and put them into categories?  And not just any categories--the categories, I'm thinking, should have the following characteristics:

1.)  They should be specific enough to be meaningful.  I don't think "Vocabulary practice" will be specific enough, although I reserve the right to change my mind.


2.)  They should be general enough that 5 or 6 of them should describe the vast majority of on-task classroom time.  "Flyswatter game" carries its own special rule set, but doesn't necessarily belong here.


3.)  They should (obviously) increase transparency of the workings of the classroom--that's the whole point in defining things, to take the mystery and guesswork out of it.  This will help the students know what is expected of them, and help the teacher know which set of rules everybody's playing by at any given time.

The sample they gave us (man, I wish I could find it online!  Well, maybe I'll end up reproducing the hard copy they gave us) had such things as "Beginning class," "Individual practice," "Small-group practice," "Whole class practice," "Instruction," and "Leaving class."  Maybe these are good enough, but I have my doubts--there are different kinds of practice, the variety of activities really IS tremendous, etc.  But following the "Ready!  Fire!  Aim!" philosophy I'm trying with good practice, I'm going to make a sample matrix, using these as activities.

Before doing all of this, a teacher has his or her classroom rules.  (Or you could tie them into school-wide expectations.)  And the matrix shows how students behave during each kind of activity for each rule or behavior expectation.  So, using the categories above, mine might look something like this:

Expectations (top row): Use your languages respectfully / Use classroom materials appropriately / Stay on task.


Categories (first column):  Beginning of class / Whole class instruction / Paired- and small-group / Individual Practice / Ending of Class

And then the intersections of the rows and the columns would contain more specific descriptions of behaviors for each of these categories.

In part 2 of this post, I'll take some of the commoner activities we do in Spanish class, and figure out (1) how they fit into this schema, and (2) where on the chunk-chew-check / I do-we do-you do forms that Kathleen Kryza has been talking to us about.

NB.  As I type this, I'm left with the vague impression that this specific technique is out of Randy Sprick's Safe and Civil Schools series.  I'll look through such materials as I have access to, and if I can find it, I'll give credit where credit is due, and let the expert show you what I'm trying to tell you.  Also, in my mind there were specific categories that went along with it.

Update, 2 Jan: I found the classroom behavior expectation matrix in the handouts.  It comes without citation, and 2 minutes' Googling didn't come up with it.  (I did find another example, from Best Behavior from Sprague and Golly.)  The categories I was trying to remember earlier: Outcomes, what you have to have done at the end of the activity; Voice, how loud you can talk and what about; Help, how to get help from the teacher and your classmates; Movement, how, when and why to move around and out of the room; Engagement, how and how much to interact with the materials; and Materials, which materials to use, and how to get and use your pencils and whatnot.

Also updated to fix some formatting.

Update 2:  I found the source of the matrix, and it was Sprick.  CHAMPS is an acronym for Conversation (can the students talk or not?  when?  how?  with whom?  what about?), Help (how do students get their questions answered?), Activity (what is the task, and what is the end product?)  Movement (Can students move?  When?  How?  Where?), and Participation (what are students doing during this time?).  This is paraphrased from p. 92 of Discipline in the secondary classroom by Sprick, 2006.  The ones in the matrix I gave earlier are probably originals from one of the presenters I saw, based on Sprick's ideas.