Animation test

I don't remember if I've already tested this, and I can't be bothered to search the archives to find out.  I should actually be working right now. 

Go!Animate is an online tool for creating flash animations with relative ease.  I say relative because it's still a fairly time-consuming process, and it isn't quite as intuitive as it likes to think it is.

I created this animation because in Spanish I, our most recent unit was about basic socializing.  The exam for the unit is a one-on-one conversation.  I have one student whom I know knows all the stuff, but I don't think I've ever heard her speak individually in class.  My thought was that, instead of having a straight-up conversation with her, she could help me do the voice-over work with this cartoon.  It turns out that you can't directly record voice-overs into the video--you have to use a different piece of software to record them, and then import them into the animation.  If your objective is creating videos, that's not a problem, but if your objective is getting reluctant students to speak, you add a whole layer of abstraction and hassle that you don't want.  So that idea isn't really going to work.

Anyway, without further ado, two methods of sharing the video:  the link,

http://goanimate.com/movie/0y_W4EyibzgY?utm_source=linkshare

and the video embedding:

GoAnimate.com: Las presentaciones by jcos

Like it? Create your own at GoAnimate.com. It's free and fun!

Update:  You can sort of record your own voice.  You call a telephone number, and it will record you, and by some mechanism, it ends up attached to your video.  It's still not as good as just pressing a record button and talking to the computer, but it might be able to work.

Teachers' unions

I did a brief spiel on Cesar Chavez for Hispanic Heritage Month, and in it I emphasized the role of the National Farm Workers' Association.  My seventh-grade class, which often calls out anything I say which even hints at political overtones, asked me many questions which made it clear they'd heard that unions were bad.  My eighth graders just wanted to know what unions did for me. 

As I answered their questions, I tried to make it clear to them that I was a biased source of information, that everything I was going to tell them was pro-union, and that therefore I couldn't be trusted to provide the whole story.  (It's more important that they know valid information when they hear it than that they like teachers' unions.)  But it made me think again about what unions are, what unions do, and why unions are generally unpopular in the US and generally getting less so.

And then I came across this excellent post by Audrey Watters, about why almost everything they say about teachers' unions is wrong, or at least skewed.  I would only add the following things.

When teachers' unions oppose reform, it is not because we (the teachers, and the members of the unions) are opposed to improvements.  We are, however, opposed to being taken advantage of.  Part of what unions do is make sure that their members' working conditions improve over time, or at least not get worse. 

And part of the argument that a certain flavor of education "reformer" makes is that teachers do not deliver value for money.  The obvious solution to this is for teachers to increase their work load and complexity by an undetermined amount up to infinity without an increase in compensation in other areas.  They call it--and this might be the worst part--accountability.  (As this paragraph currently exists, it's awfully straw man.  I'll find some examples--well, honestly, probably when I retire and write my book in the history of education at the turn of the century.)  Unions (at their best) try to slow that process down somewhat, to force consideration of whether each change is going to actually improve the students' education experience, and whether it would place undue hardship on the teachers.

This is the take-away quote from this article:   "If unions oppose merit pay, it isn’t because they want to just reward long-time teachers with higher pay, quality of instruction be-damned. It’s because what counts as “merit” in these proposals is not the same as being a good teacher."

Stealing other peoples' links

Online MP3-editing software?  Sweet!

http://cutmp3.net/

I can do it in Garage Band to a certain extent, but unless I want to pass my laptop around the classroom every time I want a student to fiddle with a song, I'm the only one.

Great thanks and hat tip to Larry Ferlazzo for pointing it out.

More books I want

The brain that changes itself, by Norman Doidge.  Recommended to me by Elaine.  It's apparently about the way your brain changes its shape all through your life, and the long-term value of learning.  Since what I do is highly dependent on brain research, and since Elaine declares it highly readable, I'll be acquiring a copy as soon as feasible.

Well, that's September gone, then.

This has been a REALLY good start to the year, I think.  I hope my students would agree.  I actually spent the first two weeks on community building, and have an outline for continuing it through.  I have enforced my rules consistently, and when I noticed a big upsurge in students pushing the boundaries, I responded in what I think is the appropriate way.  The students had seen the consequences for consistent disruptive behavior already, so the students who were testing the rules were unsurprised by their consequences.  After a few minutes, I found an excuse do to a re-focusing activity, like Braingym.  The next day, we re-covered our expectations, a la Randy Sprick, and rehearsed the routine where the students fell apart.  This was in my 8th grade Spanish class.  In almost none of my other classes have I had any difficulty that I couldn't pin on "the teacher kept us in the chair too long."  In fact, in my honors English 12 class, I have asked the students to re-write the rules--none of my original rules are a problem. 

All of this almost certainly has more to do with the school climate and the students themselves than with my opening sequence.  This school is something of an anomaly.  There's no school-wide positive behavior support system, the school expectations are not posted on banners all over the walls.  And yet the students know.  And even more amazing, they follow them.  I am frankly stunned at the internal level of communication between faculty, staff and administration that must be going on to make this happen.

What will be REALLY interesting is to see what happens in December.  Our football season ends in September, and the football coach is evidently a key part of keeping this whole system running.  We're a "Friday Night Lights" kind of school, except instead of the football players expecting special privileges because of who they are, they're held to a higher standard of comportment and academics. It's awesome. 

I'm clearly well-liked by the students.  My Spanish students tell their parents they like my class, and their parents tell my principal, and my principal tells me.  In return, I call students' homes as often as I can to gush about the wonderful things they're doing.  If it keeps up like this, the positive behavior stuff will just end up running everything.  And wouldn't that be nice? 

My Spanish 7 and 8 classes are what I expected them to be--start with social niceties, and go on from there.  (I expected my 8th graders to have had Spanish 7, and evidently this isn't universally true.  So that was a surprise.)  My Spanish I class is a little different.   They all claimed some familiarity with Spanish from middle school, but none of them could tell me what they knew, and nothing I've taught them so far

As for my actual performance in delivering content, I give myself a B in my Spanish classes, and a pretty generous C in English class.  In my early Spanish classes, I teach students the geography of the Spanish-speaking world.  (It's one of the content expectations.  I didn't write them.)  It's part of my Schmoozing 101 unit (hat tip to Annette from the County ISD for the name); students have to know where their Spanish-speaking friends are from without running to Google Earth.  (Although that is precisely what I do.)  But it's the sort of thing I hate--it's basically memorizing, it takes FOREVER to do right, and apart from some commands, I have a hard time doing it in Spanish.  So the students aren't speaking as much Spanish as I want them to.  (I've finally got the "draw your own map" project doing what I want it to do, though...yay!)  So they're learning what I'm teaching, I'm teaching it in the right way, but it doesn't feel like the right thing to teach.  I'll be working on that for future classes.

My Spanish II has thrown me a complete curve ball, because they're grammarians at the fourth-year level, but have the communication skills of people who have never spoken Spanish.  Because they haven't.  They have surprisingly strong packets of vocabulary, but there's no reliable way to predict what they have.  I've spent most of the last month selling Spanish as a vehicle for communication, and met with a few days of wide-eyed terror-stricken stares when I refused to translate directions.  They're starting to catch on, though, and I think they love it.  We started a unit in which we'll review everything that happens in a day, with a focus on them speaking Spanish every single day. After that, it will be my standard Spanish II curriculum, with a de-emphasis on grammatical concepts that they already know extremely well, and with plenty of time for back-filling.

Unsurprisingly, my English classes are a little meh.  I have a clear learning goal, and a good vision of what steps we need to take to get there.  I think my day-do-day practice is good instruction, because a lot of my students are doing good learning, some of them actually against their will.  (That was kind of a joke.)  I can clean up some of my routines, particularly the beginning of class.  But there's a gap, and I keep feeling like there's something missing.  I look around and wonder what I'm not teaching.  I may ask Annette from the ISD if she has time to observe me teach someday soon, and give me some pointers.

Stealing other peoples' links

In what I suspect is going to become a tradition, I'm going to post a link to a "Technology for Teachers" blog post, so that I'll be able to find it again later.


7 sources of free sounds for multimedia projects

Lots to read

Right.  I've started re-reading I read it, but I don't get it by Tovani.  My summary of the first couple of chapters will be up...erm, as soon as I finish reading the first  couple of chapters.  Chapter 1 is in deceptively simple storytelling form, so I'm not sure I caught the lessons from it.

Also, my textbooks came in.  I'll be taking a course in elementary Spanish methodology from a private college, starting in a few weeks.  As it happens, the two textbooks for the class are books I've written about here before--Languages and children, 4th ed., by Curtain and Dahlberg, and Teacher's handbook, 4th ed., by Shrum and Glisan.  So hopefully I'll have a chance to at least start reading those before the school year starts.

I'm writing syllabi for my new classes, although I'm still not certain which levels of English (or, for that matter, Spanish) I'll be teaching.  The grading policy should be about the same for each class, unless the district has a grading policy I don't know about.  And I'm VERY excited--I think I finally have a workable portfolio outline, something that my students can start working on from Day One.

And every teachers' website on the Internet is firing up with "Good first day of school" posts, and I've been trying to catch as many of them as possible.  Below are a few, so I can close the blessed tabs, along with a few words of take-away for each.

Using literature the first weeks of school.  From Elena Aguilar at Edutopia, a few books that a middle school teacher can use to set the tone for reading and community-building from Day 1.  She suggests Seedfolks, by Fleischman, The house on Mango Street by Cisneros, and The library card by Spinelli.  I can definitely use Mango Street; Aguilar even suggests a few ways to do it.


Start of the year routine and handouts.  Some typically excellent suggestions from the always-excellent Heather Wolpert-Gawron.  Random seating chart; beginning-of-the-year handouts; Find-a-Fib activities (X true things, 1 false things, you guess the false things); creating Works in Progress and Portfolio folders; a sample of content; and introductions to class-specific elements, like websites and positions.  I do a lot of these things already, so it's good to see them confirmed by somebody I have a great deal of respect for.


The best kind of teacher evaluation--Larry Ferlazzo writes about how to evaluate teachers the right way.  Regular observations by people who know the teachers, the students, the school, and what good teaching looks like; multiple sources of data; regular feedback from students and parents; and self-reflection.  This enforces the idea of collaborating to improve student achievement, and helps teacher leaders to know what areas need improving.  It sure beats blaming teachers for rotten test scores.  Ferlazzo also has his own blog: larryferlazzo.edublogs.org/