Room 18 Grant

What Could we do with Room 18? It’s what we’re asking of Edgewood students and teachers. Take an empty classroom and contemplate the use of space. Remove the classic classroom structures and redesign the room to encourage contemporary thoughts on learning and teaching.

Room 18, which was formerly used as a classroom, has become our laboratory for experimental thinking on instructional redesign. The lead research team includes Marilyn Blackley (4th grade), Matthew Fitzpatrick (art), Lisa Forte (music), and Paul Tomizawa (technology). The team is supported by Dr. Scott Houseknecht and William Yang, along with other staff. Our goal, with the support of a Center for Innovation grant, is to use this space to springboard ideas that seek to re-envision existing classrooms and prompt thinking on how space impacts teaching and learning. Room 18 is an environment that will provide flexible learning spaces and materials to help us develop collaborative and problem solving skills. It’s where, through the principles of Design Thinking, we can research and tackle problems, whether they are located globally or in our own classrooms. It’s where teachers and students can imagine the potential inside their own classrooms.

Teachers are perpetually intrigued with reconfiguring their rooms, for the sake of igniting student activity, but the exercise of moving and removing pieces of furniture, often leaves teachers faced with the dread of eliminating the structures that support a longstanding curriculum. Our hope is that Room 18 becomes the antidote to that dread, providing a sandbox for redesigning classroom space and curriculum experiences, while better meeting the needs of today’s diverse learners. Our hope is that this space is where teachers and students will come to be inspired, using the tools and materials they will need to some day contemplate the question: “What could we do with our own classroom?”

Rigor. The Good Kind

Kindergarteners problem solving
with Kodable.

When students are engaged in a deep-think activity, I notice the faces. Slightly scrunched with squinted, blinking eyes that signal disbelief as in "That doesn't make sense." But it's not a face that shows quit. It's a look that's about to roll up its sleeves and hunker down for serious mano a mano combat. For me, this is what rigor looks like in the classroom.

I see this expression in students of all elementary grades. Even in kindergarten as students absorb complex programming concepts through challenging activities in the Kodable app, they'll stop, stare, gaze in disbelief, but push forward to success, often with a little help from their friends and classmates.

These days rigor is considered a desired learning trait. A trendy question among parents and educators asks what rigor looks like in the classroom. It's initially a strange question to consider since the word is typically defined with words such as strictness, severity, harsh, unyielding, inflexible, and my favorite (not really) -- cruelty.

Perhaps, as parents and educators, we have come to manipulate the definition of rigor into something virtuous as a proactive response. We see a cruel world outside the protective nurturing biodomes of the home and classroom and we want children to be prepared for life's hardships, to have the savvy and Hamburger Hill-type grit to overcome the unexpected and enduring challenges in their lives. Or maybe we just want them to put down their Snapchat videos and mow the lawn. Anyone's lawn.

2nd Graders join forces.

When I see second graders, such as those in Ms. Martin's room, warming up their brains with Kodable programming challenges, coming together to share solutions, trying them each, and learning from their mistakes in Design Thinking manner, and ultimately exalting in a shared success, I'm reminded that the look of rigor does not have a standard definition. Yi Cheng and Julian say it best.

"It's fun. Is it easy? Not really. It's easy then it gets harder harder harder. We like challenges," assures Yi Cheng. "It works your brain," says Julian with the gratified look of someone's who's put in a hard day's work.
This is how you define rigor. The good kind.

Piece by Piece: Best Summer Vacation without WIFI Ever!

Design challenges with Plus Plus

For an entire week, my children indulged in activities that didn't rely on electricity or WIFI. It wasn't a form of punishment or an organized "family values" challenge (see Screen Free week). It was a week in the Adirondacks. When they weren't discovering new ways to jump in a lake or capture little frogs, they played card games (Crazy 8s, Go Fish, etc), Pixie Sticks, Jenga, but there was something new to me that was just so mind-blowing in its intellectual absorption and simplicity.

Nothing more mesmerizing than
watching your kids being mesmerized.

They are called Plus Plus puzzle pieces made by a company in Denmark. Each piece is small enough to sit comfortably on your fingertip and is made of flexible plastic. Since the sets do not come with directions, the blueprint is truly in the hands of builder. But they have the same allure of Lego bricks, begging to be pieced together. Try connecting two pieces. And I defy you to not attach a third, fourth, and so on.

The activity easily promotes fine motor development, hand eye coordination, pattern recognition, interpersonal skills since builders often ask for feedback, and spatial reasoning. Research has indicated that children who play puzzles are more likely to develop an interest in the STEM fields.

My kids would sit for lengthy sessions, manipulating the Plus Plus pieces into place in their best efforts to match the design they envisioned. There's nothing more mesmerizing than watching your children being mesmerized. I'm not sure if I could've stopped them if I waved a WIFI enabled iPad in front of them. Oh sure, now that we're back from the Adirondacks, they do have their WIFI devices again, but they're still building with Plus Plus keeping their fingers dexterous and persistent and their imaginations lively.

Classroom Architect

Create a new classroom floor plan
with this drag and drop online tool

     Teachers often wrangle with the issue of insufficient or inadequate use of classroom space. It's especially true today as teachers make the most of a 1:1 model or carve out space for making or taking apart those broken printers and VCRs. So for those teachers who want to put on their architect hat and create a new classroom floor plan, the 4Teachers site offers this handy online tool.
     For more ideas on what to consider when redesigning your room, this blog post from Edutopia offers a few suggestions. Happy hacking!

Video Book Reviews

Green screen backgrounds
can become anything!

     Second grade teacher Mrs. Marceau was looking for a way to use technology to present her students' opinion writing pieces. Book reviews. We focused on using video. Our conversation about book review videos sparked Mrs. Marceau's memory of the classic Reading Rainbow book reviews. So we decided to recreate them. I set up the green screen on the wall in the computer lab. Then the students wrote a shortened version of their book review. One that was easier to read on camera.

The closer the teleprompter is to the
camera lens, the better the student's
eye contact with the camera.

Then Emily Sun, my SHS senior options student, transferred the short text onto a web site, which turned our iPad into a teleprompter. One by one, students stepped in front of the camcorder and read from the teleprompter. It can be a nerve wracking experience for any adult, let alone 8 year olds, but each student performed admirably with their pre-production work as well as with their on-camera Reading Rainbow performance. We recorded each video and uploaded them for display on the class blog. It was hard work, but like all tough jobs, gratifying.

From Wondering to Researching to Teaching

Wondering topics ranged from
supernovas, to sustainable energy, to
Sesame Street.

     Children come to school each day with that built-in sense of wonder. Classroom teachers are challenged to find ways to sharpen their skills for finding answers to the things they wonder about. These essential research skills, whether asking targeted questions, synthesizing ideas, or educating an audience, will serve them well in school and life. Mrs. Blackley challenged her 5th grade students to wonder about anything and write a short narrative that incorporated their findings. And while their writings were fascinating reads in themselves, the impact is in the videos they produced and then published to the Internet, which will allow them to reach and teach a broader and, potentially, global audience.
     So as a class, we discussed the video medium and how the spoken words, or script, provide information, often research findings, that support the visuals. The video script is a different style of writing compared with their expository pieces. Once we had a rough script, we developed a visual storyboard using Google Slides.
     The storyboard is our pre-production plan for editing in iMovie. Students recorded their narration using Vocaroo, a web based tool, downloaded mp3, picture, and video files into iMovie, and after one or two editing lessons, were on their way. The results were impressive. But as I always tell students, the most informative and engaging videos begin with an informative and engaging script. The foundation of the video has to be a great story. Otherwise, the video becomes Grandpa's slideshow of Yellowstone Park and your audience will yawn and lean towards the door. As I often tell my students, when it comes to making videos, the easiest thing to do is make a bad one. Our goal was to make videos that engaged and informed an audience and left them begging to see it again and again. I believe we accomplished that. Check out Manami's fantastic video production as well as her storyboard. It's unfathomable that when the year began, she hardly spoke English :)

Collaborative Storytelling Experiement

Collaborative storytelling in
kindergarten with the Wixie app

I recently experimented with two things: my homemade portable sound booth and importing student pages to create a single, multimedia story using Wixie, a cloud-based drawing tool. You've got to love a job where you can take a chance on the belief that the rewards will far outweigh the risks in attempting a new technique or approach to teaching. That was the case in Ms. Theall's kindergarten class, which wrote the story of Little Bear and his search for his dancing pants. It was an idea planted by visiting storyteller, Jonathan Kruk.
   

Portable sound booth made with
canvas storage box and acoustic foam

The students each wrote a line of the story and then drew a picture of this sentence using Wixie on their iPad. That's when I broke out the new recording booth. Each student then came to me and placed their iPad in the sound booth, which was basically a 12x12 canvas storage container from Home Goods, padded with acoustic rubber foam. It does not make the recordings "sound proof," but it can block out a great deal of ambient classroom noise. And that's a good thing if you want a recording that limits the distraction of background noise.

Listening to his story, post recording. #edgewoodproud @mrtomizawa pic.twitter.com/cOeLb1cBgy

— Kindergarten Theall (@kimberleytheall) March 4, 2016

   

Import drawings from different
accounts into one Wixie project

    Once all the stories were recorded, I used Wixie's import tool. This allows the teacher to look at the Wixie files of each student in class and import the precise page needed into a new project. It makes the construction of a collaboratively authored multimedia story very simple. Take a look at our story. You'll need this public access key-- cpj65d.

New Talent Show Technology

Talent Show production crew silently
 communicates using Today's Meet

In the final February Talent Show the production crew experimented with new technology. It's a site called Today's Meet. The audience didn't see or hear it, but it kept the adult and student production team on the same page. Today's Meet is an online "backchannel" tool. The balcony and backstage crew used it to silently share information through on screen texts. For instance, the backstage "projector" light is still on or the emcee is causing feedback when he talks into the mic while underneath the PA speaker or giving the whole crew a heads up on an unplanned stage entrance. In a live show, scripted events change and the production crew needs to be ready to jump in, make adjustments, and keep the show rolling. People come out to watch our talented young performers, but the behind-the-scenes work of the backstage and balcony crew is in itself a performance worth seating an audience. Whether their work involves adjusting wireless microphones on stage or balancing vocals with recorded music through a mixer in the sound booth, each production crew member, working outside the spotlight, contributes to the show's successes. And Today's Meet, I think, will make our jobs this much easier. -- Paul Tomizawa

Media Literacy Through the PSA

     More than ever, young people need to be equipped with media literacy skills. To be able to dissect and analyze abundant digital information for meaning and credibility. To recognize fact from fiction. To understand when a message is angled towards a single perspective. One way to develop these media literacy skills is to have students produce their own digital stories. In Mr. DelMonaco's 5th grade class, we produced video Public Service Announcements. These videos were inspired by their own persuasive writing stories. We first examined production techniques used in other PSAs. We noticed the tone. Some were funny, some serious. We noticed how some conveyed information visually, some with a narrator. We discussed the possible reasons for the pacing of nvideo cuts. And we paid attention to how music influenced the message the viewers received. Then we created storyboards to convey the main idea of our persuasive writing pieces. Once the storyboards were completed and approved, the students formed small production teams and launched into the Edgewood hallways, the back yard, the front yard, and into classroom nooks with iPads recording each storyboarded scene. These scenes were then assembled in the iMovie app to put the final edits on their :30-:60 video PSAs. They were all put on display outside Mr. DelMonaco's room using the Aurasma app, but you can take a look at one of them here. This one's on school locker searches. https://goo.gl/a8Hg6p

Girls Who Engineer Their Future

Girls design 3D models in Tinkercad.

About 20 girls took part in our first lunchtime Coding & Design club of the year. These girls will engage in coding with Scratch and/or Tynker, but we began our lunch sessions in design. In Mr. Fitzpatrick's art studio (STEAM Lab), the girls used Tinkercad, an online 3D modeling program, to create artifacts that represent Edgewood history. Our school just turned 97 years old on January 5 and with our Centennial seemingly just around the corner and with the upcoming launch of the Edgewood History Club, the 3D design work seemed timely. This club is available to both girls and boys, but as the old saying goes...girls first. It's well-known that while girls are drawn towards the creative problem-solving and "making" aspect of the STEM fields, keeping them in these fields as they get older is a challenge. But educators and corporate experts believe it's possible to attract girls for the long haul. We agree. - Paul Tomizawa