Today was a consumer day for me. 

Many evenings I work on my classroom website, create new lessons, share my resources via Twitter, etc.  Those are the producer days.  I'm creating.  I'm sharing.  I've worked hard to become a producer, because creating 21st Century resources that work well for my students and are valuable to other educators doesn't happen overnight.

I've spent hundreds of days and nights learning about 21st Century teaching and learning from others.  My Twitter PLN was my number one source of information at the beginning, and it continues to be my number one resource to go to when I am seeking inspiration and new knowledge.  I also rely strongly on Edutopia for articles that really seem to connect with what I am trying to do with my students. 

But today, I spent most of my "sitting in front of the TV watching sports" time reading about what's new in education.  It was very enjoyable because it confirmed some of what I am doing in my classroom.  Many of the articles I read related to teaching kids about the 2012 Presidential Election.  I am currently doing that with my kids! 

We are currently participating in a PBL unit that I designed where my students are running for president.  They learned about the political issues of the day, took stances on them, completed an online survey to see which presidential candidate they most supported, and are now running as members of those same parties!  Each candidate has recorded videos explaining their positions on four issues through our "Virtual Debate."  Those positions had to be consistent with what their party actually believes.  We are now having a primary election (and convention) and eliminating all but one candidate per party.  All of these resources can be found above by hovering over "Present" then "2012 Presidential Election".  The lessons are found by clicking on "The 2012 Presidential Election," but the students' products are on successive rollouts.

I use Diigo when having a "Consumer" night.  I like to bookmark my websites for later use.  I make sure to use tags that make sense so they can be found easily.  I spend the time to highlight passages that are important so I don't have to re-read entire articles later on.  Much of what I read, I just incorporate into my future lesson planning or teaching behaviors, but sometimes I need to come back to an article to access the finer details.

I believe that when becoming a 21st Century Educator, it's important to start out 90% Consumer, 10% Producer.  Try to learn as much as possible from people you respect and/or agree with, and start creating a lesson here and there.  Use what you learn immediately, because it will soon be forgotten!  If you learn about a new tool, use it quickly!  If you like it, it will become part of your toolbox.  If you don't, it will soon be forgotten and you will use its failure to analyze future tools.

Slowly increase the time you spend "creating" as your lessons become more and more successful.  Pretty soon you will be 90% Producer, 10% Consumer.  Never stop learning, but also be sure to give back to the learning community to show your appreciation to those who gave you so much.  Pay it forward.  Although I am no expert, I am trying to give back by posting my materials online, tweeting about them, linking to them from other websites, etc.  I want other educators to get excited about 21st Century Education, and start teaching with the passion and drive I feel that I have today. 

Now, back to my Cubs.  I'm gonna need a little help feeling passion and drive for them anytime soon.  :(

Our writing program is having the students work on subjects and predicates, but the children are still struggling with nouns and verbs, so I decided that it was time to do some work with parts of speech!

I spent 30 minutes today introducing the eight parts of speech, complete with posters, explanations, and examples.  The students took notes while I lectured (21st Century???).  I also let the students know that we would be learning about the intricacies of each part of speech through various websites.  Today, we worked on nouns (common and proper, plural and singular, possessive, etc.).  Here is a look at the page of links my students used:

My students were able to do this completely independent from me, while I worked on progress monitoring their oral reading fluency individually in the hall.  Now, that doesn't mean it was silent!  Students were actually seen walking around helping each other, asking questions, etc.  This was a nice early check on their collaborative abilities!  I was very impressed!  Here were the steps they took to learn about nouns today:

1. They went to our classroom website (psolarz.weebly.com) - you are actually there already!  :)
2. Then, they hovered over the "Present" tab, and clicked on "Grammar."
   
3. The directions are pretty self-explanatory (as a matter of fact, your students could also follow the directions and do most of the activities themselves!).
4. When they finished all of the activities, they were asked to complete the quiz.  I used Socrative to create my quiz.  Unfortunately, this one cannot be shared as is, because you have to be logged in to get the results.  (If you set up an account, I would be happy to share the test with you, though!)  I was able to access my students' scores, so now all I need to do is enter them into my gradebook!  See below:
   

It's been three weeks of school, and my students are really starting to get the hang of things, so I decided to have them reflect on a few topics today.  I gave them the title of this blog post (of course mine was capitalized properly - when will they catch on to that?).  I listed five questions and asked them to give me three sentences for each (because I wanted them to think deeper than they typically do), but it was OK if they didn't get to every question.  The questions were:

• Why will this school year be great?
• What have you learned so far this year?
• What goals should you make for yourself this year?
• What has surprised you so far this year?
• What would you tell other students in our classroom to help them be successful this year?

Reflection is an important 21st Century skill.  I try to have my students reflect on their learning on a daily basis whenever new learning should have happened, and whenever I need students to combine their prior knowledge with their newly learned information or skills in order to synthesize the learning.  I created a video this past summer that details the reasons why reflection is important, how to do it in your classroom, and features many of my students from last year's 21st Century Classroom talking about their reflection experiences.  You can see the 7 minute video here.  Or, you can see all three videos I created regarding 21st Century Education here.

This activity is fairly rudimentary and has been done for decades by excellent teachers who knew the value of reflecting.  My students particularly enjoy the technology aspect that writing on their blogs provide, especially since they have an authentic audience in their classmates, parents, and teacher who regularly read and comment on their entries. 

Later on in the year, I will teach my students to write specific reflections that will be paired with their learning products online.  Here is a link to the page I created that details that process.

The screen shot above is the first reflection that I decided to read, and although there are spelling and capitalization mistakes, I am happy to see that this student has chosen goals that appropriate for them, their advice to their peers is something that I would say, and this particular kid likes me!  Yay!  :)  I'm looking forward to reading the rest tonight!

Read more of their reflections by reading their entries.  Hover over "e-Portfolios" above, and click on a student number. 

Our class spent some time recently studying political parties in class.  I wanted to use the time to work on the content-area strategy of selectively highlighting.  I decided that one of the ways I could get my students to be intelligent and selective in their highlighting was to explain to them that they would be given a timed, open-note quiz on the material later in the week. 

Now, the questions were mostly literal comprehension and opinion questions written in a close format, so the difficulty level was not hard (see screenshot below of the completed quiz).  But I wanted them to see that if they highlighted intelligently, then they wouldn't have to spend time re-reading the whole packet while completing the test.  They could focus on their highlighted sections and find most of the answers right away!  (Makes sense in theory, right?)

I created the quiz online, on my students e-Portfolios.  I typed up all the questions, copied them onto each child's blog, and saved it in their Drafts folder.  When it was time to take the quiz, I had all of my students sign in, access their e-Portfolios, edit the draft I created, and type in their answers.  When they were done, they published it live and the rest is history!  I now can spend an hour or two grading this quiz on my couch and see how the kiddos did!

Of course, my main purpose for doing this was to help my students learn the content-reading strategy of proper highlighting, but we also ended up with some nice reflection statements out of the activity as well!  Check out some more of their answers by hovering over the e-Portfolio tab above and clicking on one of the 25 e-Portfolio links if you'd like!

Disclaimer: I'm not sure if others would worry about privacy concerns.  I'm not worried about it because:

• I called it a quiz to the kids, but it's really no more than a worksheet,
  
• their grades are not public, and
• if they'd like, they can edit it at any time from home.  :)

That all being said, I don't think I would use this format for a real test due to those privacy concerns.

(Click here to go to Our Classroom YouTube Page with all the videos.)

Our class has been working hard in our Election Simulation to understand the issues that the presidential candidates have to take positions on, so today we started our Virtual Presidential Debate! 

I started this lesson by having the students do some general research on the issues that their political party has taken sides on.  Then, we went into an empty room next door to watch me perform a mock debate where I had two students move their lips while I spoke for them on two issues important to my students: hot lunch choices in our cafeteria and the amount of homework teachers can assign.  As I spoke for each child, I took a slightly different position and explained my thoughts clearly.  I supported my opinions with facts and tried to appeal to my audience's senses.  After getting some laughs for our performance and a standing ovation for putting a limit on homework, I explained to them that I will want candidates to explain the political issue and state their position in the same ways that I did. 

Each candidate (and their campaign staffs) were given a specific issue to research (today it was Education), find out what their party's position is on it, and write and perform a debate speech on video.  We then posted them on our Political Issues page online for others to see.  These videos are unedited, but they were allowed to be scripted so students could work collaboratively to make intelligent-sounding speeches in teams. 

Our first videos are pretty weak.  I encourage you to watch one or two, because it's good to see where kids are at to start the year and then look again at the end of the year to appreciate their growth!  I also learned that I am expecting my students to learn a bit too much on their own this early in the year.  I will need to scaffold the future topics better so my students have a better understanding of what it is they are taking a position on.  Finally, my students keep using their last names in their videos, so I need to remind them again that we don't do that for privacy reasons!!!  :)  I've attached one of the videos that did not use a last name for your perusal, but the links should be active by tomorrow with re-done videos sans their last names, if you'd like to see them then!

Here are all of the issues facing this year's presidential candidates that we created videos for our Virtual Debate:

• Education
• Health Care
• Social Security
• Immigration
  

Today, my students were put into partnerships and asked to walk around the school to find three examples of the eight forms of energy that we studied in class.  They were given a digital camera, a clipboard, and a piece of paper with the eight forms of energy written on it.  As they took pictures, they jotted each down under the correct category so they would end up with enough pictures.  (The eight forms of energy we have studied so far are: electrical, chemical, sound, light, gravitational, elastic, motion, and heat.)

Normally, I have an adult go with each group, but I wasn't able to get volunteers on short notice this year, so they were asked to show me maturity and responsibility as they completed their scavenger hunt.  Myself and another teacher were able to walk around the school and keep an eye on everyone, though.  I was so proud of them for whispering in the hallway, introducing themselves to teachers whose rooms they entered (when their kids were gone), and they also did a nice job taking turns with the camera!

This Friday, we will take those images and create an Energy Wheel to show off our pictures!  (See image above from last year.)  Last year, I allowed some students to do their Energy Wheel on Keynote, Glogster, Prezi, Google Presentation, and on poster paper, but this year we will all do it like the image above.  (I don't have any adult help in the classroom this year, so I'm going to make it easy on myself!)

This lesson focused on maturity, responsibility, independence, collaboration, technology, critical thinking, classifying, and managing their time (in addition to skills I didn't think of). 

21st Century Education in action!  :)

Since we are currently studying the 2012 Presidential Election, I wanted to combine our current study of character traits in our reading with the requisite traits of American presidents. 

Before the lesson, I created a Google Form.  Here were the directions: "As you discover character traits that the president needs to have, submit them on this form. Character traits need to be one word, or hyphenated words (e.g. risk-taker), but instead of using a hyphen you need to use a tilde (~) for Tagxedo to recognize it. Spaces are not allowed between words! Only submit one character trait at a time." 

Here were the two questions on the Google Form: (1) Character Traits Necessary to Be President of the United States, and (2) First Name & Last Initial.  I made both questions required so that students could not submit answers without a name.  I then made sure to share my Google Form publicly, so my students could access it.  (In our district, Google Docs can only be shared with those within our district, so I had to have all of my students sign into Google before starting the lesson.)

I started my instruction by showing them how to do a proper Google search.  I chose to type in, "personality traits of presidents" and see what came up.  The first few were actually pretty good!  Then, I showed them how to evaluate the information from each website, rather than just regurgitate the information.  Requirements were that they only posted traits that they agreed with and knew what the trait meant. 

Next, I showed my students the importance of reporting character traits as a response to the prompt, "Our president should be...(honest)" or "Our president should be a good...(leader)"  I showed them on our sample website how to make the trait fit the prompt (e.g. communication skills was changed to communicator).  (We did not evaluate the effectiveness of websites today - I generally don't love those "answers" websites, but that's what we used as our sample today.)  By using the same format, we were able to make the Tagxedo above.  With Tagxedo, the more often a word is listed, the larger it will appear in the visual. 

Next, I let my students independently research what others thought were important qualities presidents should have in order to be successful in their job.  They wanted to add their own ideas, but this time I said no.  I wanted them to focus on traits that they couldn't think of themselves (new learning).  I think that this was a good idea because otherwise students would have spent a lot of time listing traits like "nice" and "smart" instead of what we got.

I projected the Google Form Spreadsheet on the board as answers were coming in.  I edited the list live and gave additional feedback to the group when answers were received that were not formatted properly or were too complicated to be understood. 

When I called "time", I copied and pasted the 200 words that we gathered and went to tagxedo.com on Safari.  (Firefox needs to be started in 64-bit mode or something like that and doesn't work for me on this website.)  I loaded the United States outline (I tried the Abe Lincoln one, but it didn't look as good.) and I pasted the words into it.  After messing with the colors and fonts, I saved the image and posted it online for the kids to see.  They were very proud of their work and they enjoyed reading the qualities everyone found out that a president should have.

Tomorrow, we will incorporate this activity into our own political campaigns.  Half of my class is currently running for president of the United States in our mock election.  They will try to focus on traits that they believe they have that would make them a good president as they make campaign slogans and advertising materials.  The other half of the class has dropped out of the race or has been dropped by their political party and are now campaign managers for the other candidates.  They will work as a team to make these materials as they prepare for the upcoming mock-primary.  Wish us luck with this one!