Building Collaborative Classrooms

The day has started rather inauspiciously as we are in the midst of a Southern snow storm….the best kind.  Warwick delayed by two hours and there were no delays at the IU so I came over arriving about 7:50 for 8 am registration.  An hour later there are about 20 people here and most of the schools in Lancaster County including Warwick are closed.  The coaches are having an emergency regroup meeting since many of them are not going to make it.

I am curious to see what happens here.  I could work on American Literature, poetry, grammar, vocabulary, or writing.

The wikispace that we will use today is http://cffexplore.wikispaces.com

Cindy Anderson:  from the IU Alphabet soup:  How does it connect?

Cindy Anderson gave an overview of how all the initiatives that we are living with in education fit together.  The following acronyms were covered.

CFF:  Classrooms for the Future

SAS: Standards Aligned Systems

Student Achievement requires the following characteristics:

• Clear standards
  • Clear, high standards that establish what all students should know and be able to do by specific grade levels
  • Now have standards for grades 9-12
• Fair Assessments aligned to standards
  • Summative
  • Formative
  • Benchmark
  • Diagnostic
  • Beginning with the “end in mind” (UbD)
  • Assessment Anchors
• Curriculum framework
  • a framework specifying Big Ideas, Concepts, and Competencies in each subject area/at each grade level.
  • LFS a curriculum planning model;  TOOLBOX=the LFS web-based curriculum managements solution
• Instruction
  • Aligning instruction with standards involves identifying strategies that are best suited to help students achieve the expected performance
    • Differentiating Instruction
    • Using 21st Century Instructional Technologies (CFF)
    • LFS–a planning model;  strategies for high levels of student engagement
• Materials & Resources
  • Materials that aligne to the standards
    • units and lesson plans
    • instructional Resources (Media
    • Technology
• Intervention
  • A safety net/intervention system that insures all students meet standards
    • DI
    • Web-based intervention

GCA

DI:  Differentiated Instruction

EdHub:  http://www.edportal.ed.state.pa.us/portal/server.pt

house the SAS and other PDE Tools

UbD: Understanding by Design

AE & EC

LFS: Learning Focused School Toolbox

• • SAS connections to LFS
  • Student Assessment and culminating Activity Tabs
  • Know, Understand & Do in LFS Toolbox

My “breakout” session was with the writing group.  There were four of us led by Jeff Rothenberger and after getting everyone “joined” to the wiki and setting up a Google Doc (Click here), we decided to create a lesson to teach narrative writing.  We brainstormed, shared, and finally came up with a lesson. (Click here).  Although this lesson is simplistic for my 10th grade students, I will adapt it and use some of it to differentiate for the students who need more support when creating their Research Narratives during 4th marking period.

During my creative writing course, one of the activities that we do is a drama. Students write short plays, actually radio dramas. I have a tape recording of the Orson Wells “War of the Worlds” which we have listened to so students could hear sound effects and the reading of the play by actors in the radio studio that sounds like the real thing. I have looked for a podcast of that radio broadcast and haven’t found one yet. In the mean time, I have been looking for other radio shows that would be appealing to students in their “antiquity.” I have found the Captain Midnight shows on iTunes store and have downloaded them to my laptop. I was also able to find an external link for the series. This is a sight that contains a link to iTunes from which the podcast can be downloaded.

I chose these because they parallel with the action hero movies like Fantastic Four, The Incredibles, Batman, and Spiderman that are so popular with kids today. They are also a manageable length, ranging from 14-20 minutes.  Since my students have access to iTunes on the laptops, they could also search for other podcasts that appropriate examples of radio dramas.  I feel comfortable having them use iTunes to search because their a limited number of podcasts of radio dramas and iTunes rates the content so that students can be directed to get only those that are rated “clean”  and ” family.”

In teams, students create the story board and script including sound effects. They then record their radio dramas. In the past I have had them tape record their dramas; now I will have them create their own podcasts using Garageband.  I am looking forward to doing this.