Well, its finally here. Labour Day 2010 and that means school starts tomorrow. I anxiously await the arrival of 23 new grade 8 students, who I know very well from rotary Science in grade 7. What does this mean for me?

Well, to begin, classroom rules and routines are already established.
I know about modified programs and accommodations for certain students.

These two criteria are so important and give me a huge advantage over teachers who do not teach rotary (and rotary is slowing dieing here).

So whether you start tomorrow, have started, or worse, have more holiday time left (;-) ), enjoy the time back with your students. It is the honeymoon faze where bad behaviours are almost nonexistent.

PS: twiducate broke 20,000 users last week. Its becoming difficult to keep up with all the emails I receive, but I am still enjoying it. I look forward to using it again this week.

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Wanted to share this resource. Many interesting ideas.

47 Ways to use Wordle

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Well with only a few days left in school is is difficult to motivate my grade 8s to write with grad so close.

Since we are studying climate in Science class, we have been watching Survivorman, since he visits a different climate in each episode. For anyone who has never seen the show, Les Stroud attempts to survive 7 days in a remote location with only a few items. He builds fires with flashlights, batteries etc., drinks from streams and builds shelters with branches. Every time he builds a fire with a new unique method, we pause the show, break into groups and write a quick procedural ‘hotwo’. Now we have conquered our writing framework as well.

Next time I will have students report on the location he is in or write an explanation about water sustainability and why he boils it in many episodes. Survivorman is available on iTunes.

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I was just informed about Scratch’s new ‘big nbrother’ called Panther. Apparently made by major Scratch users and contains code blocks missing from Scratch. I haven’t checked it out yet but would love to hear feedback.

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Now over 10,000 teachers and students are using twiducate. Hard to believe it is only 4 months old. I haven’t had much time for updates as we are heavy into term 3 at school. I hope to make some changes in the summer…Please be patient.

www.twiducate.com

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Many of us are finishing up an inference unit and looking ahead to making connections. If you think like me, the units are backwards but that’s another topic. I know many of you are thinking (well, they are very similar), I argue that students must connect before they can infer. I am surprised at the number of people who disagree with me. They argue that a good connection will come from a good inference.

Anyway….I wanted to post about twiducate and its use with these two topics. Its very easy to embed pictures and youtube videos into twiducate. I would suggest doing this, pinning the post to the top of the timeline and having your students infer / connect to the media you have posted. This way each student gets to post, read and comment on everyone elses post. Hopefully students will connect to other student posts and comment about it. Ideally you would want some self connections to the media you presented but you could extend this to have your students connect with each other and post comments. You could even prompt worldly connections to be made in the comments section.

If you are just interested in inferences, why not post some piece of text (song, pic, video, story etc.) and have students post evidence to support an opinion. You’d be surprised at the discussions that could unfold on twiducate. There seems to be more confidence in students behind an avatar.

What are your thoughts on connections / inferences? Can you change my twiducate lesson idea to make it better?

admin General inferences, making connections, twiducate

So we have started our Explanation Writing unit. For those of you who are unaware, our board has a writing framework in place that we all follow.

I am really enjoying this form of writing. Since explanations usually answer the ‘why’, we are exploring cause and effect relationships and how far we can extend them as intermediate student.

For example:
Cause: Throwing Snow at School
Effect: (Obviously!) – Getting into trouble

This was how our unit started with our cold pieces. However, now my students are using their thinking caps and extending those effects. Now we write:

Cause: Throwing Snow at School
Effect 1: Accidentally Breaking a Window
Extension: Having to pay for the window, get suspended and grounded.
Effect 2: Accidentally hitting a passing car.
Extension: Blinding / scaring the driver who may get into an accident.
Extension: Having to explain to the police why you were throwing snow.

As you can see, we are being imaginative. The struggle now lies between narrative storytelling and real plausible cause and effect relationships. I expect three effects and a good solid five paragraph explanation with and introduction and a conclusion.

Recently we wrote about playing inappropriate video games at school.

Cause: Playing inappropriate video games at school.
Effect: Embarrass your teacher by breaking rules.
Extension: Label our entire division in the eyes of younger grades.
Extension: Younger student sees, mimics behaviour, plays the same game
Extension: Younger students’ parents phone school. Principal calls you to the office.

You get the idea. We have also played cause and effect games to get us out of our seats. Each student gets a cause or effect and has to find a matching partner.

Or, give students the effects, and have them develop causes.

Our next writing topic will be “Explain why it is not a good idea to text while driving” since this law is now in place here in Ontario.

admin General anchor chart, Explanation Writing

Well, recently it seemed that every second or third hit to this site redirected elsewhere. I think I found the problem. Must be a wordpress exploit because the javascript code was in the header, and I didn’t put it there.

Anyways, if it DOES redirect you to another site and I did not find the hack, please email me contact@mraspinall.com.

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If you’ve been here before you know what Scratch is and its benefits. I was just informed about a Scratch app which plays Scratch projects on the Ipod.

This will interest my students. It also gives me more support to argue for a class set of Ipod Touches .

If you are new here, Scratch is a drag and drop programming platform in which you can create animations, video games or screen savers. Due to its drag and drop component, no need to worry about syntax errors. Yes, logical errors may arise but this gives our students opportunities for critical thinking.

Now we can develop together on the SMARTBoard as well as locally on our Ipods!!

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I haven’t posted in a very long time due to most of my efforts being spent on www.twiducate.com. This week saw huge growth. The service now has 5000+ members from all over the world.

Its been a fun project. There has been plenty of positive feedback.

Again, sorry for not posting in a while. As for technology in the classroom, we have been using twiducate for collaborative work, feedback and a general discussion area. It has proven useful.

-Brian

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