I’ve been thinking about how to maximize my time … in many ways.  One of those has been my drive to work.  At the moment, it’s been a great time to reflect, but I can’t archive those thoughts in a way that’s meaningful to me.  By the time I reach school I’m thinking about my day ahead and what needs to be done.  I’ve lost those reflective thoughts and, most of the time, I can’t get them back.

With a nod to Kevin Honeycutt’s Driving Questions podcast, I’ve been looking around for ways to make that drive time meaningful.  I think I’ve found one way — the transcription service embedded within my Google Voice account.  If I get time, I’ll write a bit more about this later, but for now, here’s my first “memo” to myself, embedded below:

And the transcript:

“Trying out the voicemail feature voice and thinking about using it as a way to virtually were right new blog post about ideas that I have in things that I’d like totry, so let’s see how this works.”

Not perfect, but something I can use as a rough draft.  I’m excited to see how it may impact my content production.  We’ll see.

Thanks again, Google, for creating such a great service and kudos to the guys on the forums who pointed me to this solution!   Now I’m only waiting for that Wave invite …

So … Wordle.

This little app has been used to valuable effect by comm arts teachers in the middle school I serve and I just found a great post by Samantha Lunn (thanks @senorG) about 23 ways it could be incorporated into the modern foreign language curriculum.

One of her ideas was to grab the RSS of a news feed and watch how the words change from time to time, talking about those ideas in the target language.  A great thought.  But I taught Latin.  How would I use this?

One way would be to pull out important vocabulary words from a difficult passage, or, as we often read from different “readers” with texts collected from many different writers, it would be an enlightening exercise to pull the passages from each author through the Wordle process to see what vocab each author preferred.  Displaying this information from the beginning could give students a flavor of each writer, something that would be deepened as the students got a sense of grammatical style, topical interests, etc.  It might also be a good starting point for vocabulary building.

But what about that feed element?  How could I use this with an ancient language?  Thankfully, there’s at least one person using Twitter  in latinam linguam.  Here’s a Wordle of her feed below.  I’m looking forward to seeing it grow and change, but I’m hesitant to publicize whose feed it is.   My hesitancy comes from the position of someone for whom writing in the Latin language is not easy.

What sort of assessment would it be for us to have students writing in Latin, in Twitter, and seeing a Wordle of their own change over time?  It seems challenging, but strangely motivational.  I think my Wordle would look much like the one above (lots of hodie for me too (‘today’ to the non-Latini out there)), but if I was contributing to a formative assessment like Wordle, I think I’d be more likely to vary my vocabulary and drive that ‘hodie’ down a bit, inserting richer vocabulary words as I learned them.

Obviously, I wouldn’t be using Twitter as it’s intended, but the possibilities are intriguing.  Oh, and one more bit of thanks to @teachpaperless for the work he’s doing with students and Twitter.  It’s because of his current approach to teaching that my mind was on how to use these two tools together.   If anybody out there gives this a shot, let me know.  I’d love to see your Wordles.

A few interesting links about using Skype in your classroom:

• What is Skype? — explanation provided by a digital literacy class exploring the possibilities of Web 2.0 technologies
• What’s been done with Skype?
  • 5th grade class in NY connects with the world and shares their experiences
  • 4th grade class in Hannibal, MO learns Spanish while ESOL student learns English, plays math games with another class across the US, and keeps up a long-distance connection with classroom in England
  • PE teacher in Australia invites expert dietitian to talk with students about making healthy choices
  • technology teacher shares Aussie customs with classroom in Russia, ends up on Russian TV
• How can I find people with whom I can Skype?
  • Ask.  You may be surprised at who says yes.  Contact an old professor, a colleague in another district, someone you meet at a conference, almost anyone who can get to a computer.  If you’re hesitant because of the setup, drop a note to your local, friendly educational tech support person.
  • Participate in a social network, like Classroom 2.0 or ePals, and start a thread requesting to start a collaborative connection (like this one).
  • Visit one of these sites:
    • Skype in Schools : a directory of people across the US who are interested in connecting with others
    • Skype in the Classroom: a place to peruse the “want ads” of Skyping educators.  Add your name to the list by adding a comment.
  • Send a note to this gal in Australia, who wants to contact 80 countries over the next year.  She should have some international contacts soon!

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Update (1/5/09):

As I’ve been thinking about this topic again, I’d like to update this page with a few more ideas and links:

1)  Small features, big impact:  Some of the features of Skype I left off above compromise a large part of what makes Skype my tool of choice (besides the fact that it’s the only district-approved IM client).  I’ve often used:

• the ‘Send File’ feature to quickly transfer files to my colleagues
• the ‘Share your screen’ feature to compliment video conferences I’m doing or to illustrate a set of steps to a teacher or colleague
• the IM feature to ask brief questions

2)  A big idea behind the effectiveness of Skype is that of a purposeful, authentic audience.  The best Skype projects I’ve seen have been those that include a meaningful context.  In one notable example, two Spanish teachers, one at the middle school and one at the high school, managed to have time where upper-level Spanish 5 students had common time with incoming 8th grade students.

These teachers used the opportunity of overlapping time to host a “Get to know West High” session, where the senior students created engaging skits that would introduce the next year’s freshmen to life in high school — all in the target language.  The highlight of the time was a “live interview”, in Spanish, with the 8th graders’ future principal.

3) Skype isn’t the only player in the voice over IP (VOIP) world.  Other web-based technologies (which don’t involve an install) are cropping up.

Thanks to Jim Sarris, a Spanish teacher in New York, one of the Spanish teachers in my district has been able to allow her students to talk one on one with students from Mexico, practicing their Spanish with native speakers through a website called Tokbox.

Richard Byrne recently wrote a great post on other sites that are springing up to make video conference even more accessible to the classroom.

image courtesy of DBGthekafu

Last week I promised a few people that, in honor of the grading period, I would post some comments on assessment.  Instead of blogging that weekend, however, I worked late into the night on a few occasions in order to get our kitchen sink and faucet installed.  No more washing dishes in buckets!  So, in honor of a working kitchen sink (with no leaks), I’ll be blogging today about a few assessment techniques I’ve heard about and used over the last few months.  

 In general, I am most excited, as a teacher, about informal, formative ways to get some feedback.  When I was in the classroom, most of these took the form of quick, impromptu “fist of five” check-ins or “exit slips” students would turn in as they went out the door.  ”Formative assessment” was a double-sided coin, I found.  On the one hand, I often got a good sense of which concepts were giving my students the most trouble.  On the other hand, though, addressing those needs meant slowing down my instruction and differentiating for those learners who had a fine grasp of the material and wanted to move on.  I’ll address the one side in this post, but feel free to share your thoughts on the flip side in the comments below!  

 Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard at least one interesting “low-tech” formative assessment, and I’ve been experimenting with some “tech” tools that can quickly gather data useful to informing our instruction.  First the “low-tech”:  This technique is courtesy of Peggy Dersch, STAR teacher for Missouri and formerly debate teacher at Parkway West High.

• Hand out your 4 or 5 question survey and ask students to take it.
• Then ask all the students to wad up the surveys and throw them into a pile in the center of the room.
• Instruct students to then plunge into the pile and retrieve a survey (not their own).
• Create a “human bar graph” for each question by having students group according to the answers they find on the survey in their hands. 

 Isn’t that a great idea?  Anonymity is preserved, students get up and moving, and everyone sees where the class “shakes out” as a whole.  Sometimes I’d want to drill down that data, though, to find out exactly who are the students who really need the help.  To do that, one tool that’s making its way into our district can really help.

Smart Technology’s “Senteo System” gathers and displays anonymous data, just like the activity above, but it keeps students’ names attached to their answers.  Even if their peers don’t see those mistakes, you do.  For me, that’s a distinct benefit, especially if I want to, say, give a pre-test for my unit to see what parts I really need to hit.  I wouldn’t want to embarrass anyone in reviewing those questions with students, and Senteo keeps all those names in the “back end” of the program.  

 Another great benefit of the Senteo is its flexibility: I don’t have to prepare a quiz in order to get feedback.  If I’m in the midst of a lesson and start seeing glassy eyes and vacant stares, I can drop in question and ask for students to respond on the spot.  I still get a neat graphical display of the answers and I’ve hooked the kids back in by requiring their participation.

 The final tool that I’ve been using quite a lot is a relatively new addition to Google Docs, an online office suite.  “Google Forms” allows you to create a free online survey.  But why use this over other services like “Free Online Survey,” “Survey Monkey,” etc.?  What I like about it is that you get to keep the data. 

 All of the responses are dropped into a Google spreadsheet.  That spreadsheet can be exported to Microsoft Excel and sorted as you wish.  Currently, I’m using a Google Form to gather data about a variety of software applications from teachers at Parkway West High.  My plan is to sort that data according to department and develop content-focused professional development.  In the classroom, I think this would best fit situations when you want to gather survey data about your students – likes and dislikes, course evaluations, access to certain resources, etc.

 So, whether using tech or not, I’m excited to get a better idea of where my students are at.  These tools hold some exciting opportunities to get that information and use it to effectively change our instruction.