MakerSpaces on TV!

Right before school started, I got an email from my friend, Emily Greene, the administrator of NKY MakerSpace. Kentucky Life, a show on KET public television, wanted to do a spot on makerspaces in Kentucky.  Emily asked if I would be willing to bring a class to her makerspace for the filming.  It didn't take me long to respond with a big resounding YES!!!!!

We got our fifth grade on board, and had to move quickly with permission slips, letters home, and media releases.  There's nothing quite as crazy as having a field trip on the sixth day of school with TV cameras rolling. Oh, and for an extra bit of stress, the district superintendent was wondering through the classes as well.

While Emily taught about electrical circuits in one room, I was teaching Makey Makey in another. Of course, it was a chaotic mess. If you've ever used Makey Makey, you know that things can get loud. You know what? It was fun! Students earned badges.  They explored. We all learned. It was an amazing day, and I'm so glad we did it!

Of course, I have to remind myself that the real reason for Yealey Elementary being at the makerspace was to create a realistic look for the cameras.  But, it's always nice when someone shares the spotlight with you.

Below is the video that aired on KET. And, I had no idea Duncan Hines was a real person or that he was from Kentucky.  Wow! (We come on around 4:00, but I was really into the Kre8Now segment before it too.

Hey, Hey, Hay! We're starting Book Commercial Today!

It's that time of year! I'm very excited to start our second grade book commercial project again this year! One thing we want to do is connect our students with an actual published children's book author.  This step is so very important in the process.  It helps our students see that authors are real people and how they go about writing their books.

A few weeks ago, I searched Nepris.com for a children's book author who I thought could connect well to our second graders. I was very happy to find Christy Mihaly who seemed like just the right fit for our room. Mrs. Mihaly recently published two books, one of which is called Hey, Hey, Hay!  I sent her a message through Nepris and she agreed to be our author this year. 

Today was our first of hopefully a few chats where we talked about her books, her writing process, and how books are promoted.  Mrs. Zureick and I were so pleased to see that she related beautifully to the students, talked through the entire writing and publishing process, and even talked about how she needs to promote her books.  Wow!  I was surprised how much work goes into making a book successful. 

As she said to us, "My book isn't doing its job if no one is reading it." In other words, the book promotion is just as important as the writing process.  What an amazing segue into our commercial process.  Soon we will be working hard to promote good books in our school library and (hopefully) in local book stores. 

As an extra bonus, Mrs. Mihaly was even nice enough to take her laptop into her Vermont backyard to show us the fall colors in New England -- a welcome change to our unseasonably warm October days here in Kentucky.

Thank you, Mrs. Mihaly and Nepris for making today happen!

How I Gamified My MakerSpace

I became a makerspace teacher in the 2017-18 school at the request of my principal.  As an elementary teacher masquerading as a technology teacher, I had no clue what I was doing. Of course, that didn't stop me from tackling a crazy cool assignment.  I had researched a few new maker gadgets and purchased what I could. I also brought in some of my old coding standbys I've used the past.  But, to be honest, I had no idea how to run a makerspace.

That year was a blur.  The room needed to be transformed from computer lab to makerspace.  I had to learn the new devices and find ways to talk my colleagues into bringing their kids to me.  Since my class isn't in the specials rotation, I had to rely on teacher buy-in and that was hard.  When I did get a class in my room, the focus was mainly on exploration and trying to avoid tears and hurt feelings.

At the very end of the school year, my district went through a major project looking at success criteria and mastery learning for all standards in all content area.  That's when an epiphany hit me... a badge system!

I spent the summer working on breaking down all my gadgetry and apps into smaller bite-sized pieces. Each of those levels were designed to bring students from novice to expert in the field and eventually using multiple devices together. What started as a nugget of an idea turned into a website that has turned my makerspace into a game for the students and an organized curriculum for me.

Click Picture for Web Site

As you navigate the site, you can see numerous options for student choice and growth in various disciplines.  In general, the badges start out very teacher directed but wind up with ways for students to explore ways they want to use the technology. I knew that digital badges would win their hearts and give them a chance to display what they know and can do.  

The next step was teacher buy-in.  Getting students excited means nothing if I can't get them in my room.  That's why I am hosting a Maker Monday once a month after school.  Any employee in the school is given the opportunity to come in for an hour, learn the technology, and earn badges for themselves.  My first Maker Monday had 10 teachers, earning 5 badges, in 4 disciplines.  I call that a win!

Students are encouraged to tackle any device or app that interests them.  I try not to direct them to any one thing unless it's a request by the teacher. This gives students the opportunity for student choice.  It also means I frequently have students working in four or more disciplines. 

 

While I am anticipating a lot of traffic this year, my most consistent class has been third grade.  They are sending me 12 kids for about three weeks and rotating groups throughout the year.  I am amazed at the results already.  One girl who I remember as painfully shy as a second grader is my rock star.  She is knocking out badges left and right.  I love watching as another girl -- wonderfully sweet and bright -- struggles and works her way through something that -- finally! -- doesn't come easily for her.  We've had talks about this being a MAKERspace, and I expect them to MAKE.  MAKING is where the learning is.  It's OK to PLAY a bit, but this isn't a PLAYERspace because I want them to create. 

Soon, it will be time for this group to rotate out, but I'm having two overlap days.  My outgoing class will buddy up with the incoming class to show them the ropes.  I am so excited!

Moving forward...

• My next job is to align these badges to standards. While this program helps tap into another intelligence and helps teach the whole child, the teachers need to see how this work helps them teach students in their curriculum
• I'm constantly working on adding more devices to the list.  At this typing, I'm working on badges for Kodable, a coding game for non-readers. 
• I'd like to make a "The Making of..." post to show how I made the badges and the site. 

I'd love to hear how you have organized your makerspace and how you think I could improve our badge program. 

Three Months, a Bunch of 7 Year Olds, and 99 Book Commercials

Without a doubt, the highlight of the fall semester of this year for me can be summed up with this video.

Yealey Elementary Book Commercials from Steve Oldfield on Vimeo.

Mrs. Zureick and I worked together to help our second graders create book videos to promote reading with younger children.  This is a project we did on a smaller scale last year, but we ramped it up during a Project Based Learning seminar this summer with the Buck Institute for Education.

I'm really excited about this project, the time I spent with the second graders, working with the second grade team, and the final product.  This blog post will serve as a means to hit the highlights, and I'm fairly certain it will be a long one.

A solid PBL unit will have a strong driving question to guide the process. The question we posed to the students at the beginning was...

How can we as readers and book reviewers help beginning readers pick interesting books? 

I think this was a hard concept for the students to think about when we first talked to them.  We got a lot of answers like, "Well, I just tell them what I thought of the book."  I remember how we would explain to them that we couldn't just have them sit in the library and explain each book.  "Oh, well they can just call us on the phone and we'll tell them." Finally, we guided them to the idea of creating book commercials that would be available through the Internet and QR codes inside book covers.  They loved the idea!

We spent a lot of time talking about success criteria for good commercials, watching and critiquing other videos, and modeling the process ourselves.  Finally, we got to survey kindergartners and first graders in our school about books they liked before our local public library brought us a massive stack of books to work with.

As part of our project, we were able to have a video chat with an author who told us about her books, the writing process and how to create a good book promotion.  Tricia Stewart Shiu and Nepris were a huge help in our process of growing from readers to book reviewers.

If you've ever written anything you know the writing process can be lengthy.  If you've ever watched second graders handwrite anything, you know it takes forever.  I watched as students would write up a paragraph, get feedback from a peer, cross it all out and rewrite the whole thing.  It was at that point I got a crazy idea.  Let's teach second graders how to use Google Docs.  I don't know when your school starts working with cloud computing, but these kids just got their fingers on Chromebooks a few weeks earlier.  This was huge! I think it took two days to get them on Docs and type up their commercials, but it was a massive step forward in our process.  We got to teach the editing process without waiting half a class period between drafts.

Finally, the students were ready to record their videos.  We use WeVideo in our school for video creation and editing.  I love how it's quick and easy to create videos in the cloud and sharing is super easy. One goal we had for the video aspect of this project was not to just hold their hands as they created videos but to train them to be the teachers.

Once videos were completed, I did a bit of tech work in the background.  I downloaded the videos to my hard drive then immediately uploaded them back to our Vimeo page.  Then we created QR Codes for each commercial.  Finally, I sent everything to our public library for them to process on their end.

As the first round of 24 videos were being completed, we started up plans to continue the project through the rest of the second grade in our school.  Since we trained these students to be the teachers, we were able to sit back and watch them help their friends. It was at that point that Children Inc. found out about our service learning project and wanted to create the video you saw at the top of the page.

The end result was astounding! Ninety-nine book commercials were put on display at the library!  We hosted an open house a week ago for students and families to come and see the videos.  It was such a great culminating event to celebrate all this hard work! I wish I could tell you all the stories of self-confidence found, leadership skills honed, and love of reading kindled.  I am so glad I got to take part in this amazing project!

Now, for a reward for reading this far, I'm going to share with you some of my favorite commercials.


HI FLY GUY from Donna Logan on Vimeo.


Farmyard Beat from Donna Logan on Vimeo.


BAD KITTY DOES NOT LIKE THE SNOW from Donna Logan on Vimeo.


Spider Man V.S. Doc Ock from Donna Logan on Vimeo.

How We Talked to an Author 2000 Miles Away

I am currently working with our second grade to create book commercials that will be posted in our local public library as well as our school library.  I worked along with one of our teachers to do this project last year, but we wanted to make the project bigger and better for this year.  I'll get to the whole project in a future post, but today I want to focus on our author chats.

Over the summer, I contacted Nepris about our project.  If you've never heard of Nepris, you should hop on over there right now and create an account.  They will connect you and your class to a professional who can talk with your class about whatever topic you are discussing.  Think of what your next unit will be about.  Would you like to talk to a person who works in that field but don't know the perfect person to chat with? Don't worry. Nepris will set up a video chat with a professional so your kids can learn more from an expert.

Nepris connected us with Tricia Stewart Shiu who is an award-winning author, book reviewer, and motivational speaker, living in the Los Angeles area.  I had never heard of Ms Stewart Shiu before but I can honestly say she has quickly become a favorite in our school.  I have now been a part of two sessions with her and have a third scheduled in a couple weeks.  

Tricia has everything you could possibly want in a guest speaker for your class. She knows her profession well.  She understands the writing process and how to promote books and is able to communicate these skills to our students.  Not only is she knowledgeable, but she is able to bring that knowledge to the students' level.  Some people may accidentally talk over the heads of primary-aged students, but Ms Stewart Shiu doesn't do that.  She knows her audience well.  Finally, she is enthusiastic about her work and genuinely loves to talk to the kids about it. As we know from working with kids, enthusiasm is contagious.  As she displays her excitement about writing, the kids start to pick on that and get more excited for their projects too.  

I'm so glad that I was able to connect with Nepris and with Tricia Stewart Shiu.  I encourage you to find your professional expert today!

Blending Math Class

Since Christmas, I have been working alongside Mrs. Justice to help personalize learning in her 5th grade math classes. It's been an interesting ride trying to find practices that best fit her students and her style.  We're nowhere near ready to call this a completed project, but we've come so far already. I wanted to blog about where we've been and the direction we're going.  Hopefully by the time school lets out I can create a post about how we've totally personalized learning in 5th grade math.

Station Rotation Model
When I first started visiting Mrs. Justice's room, she already had a station rotation model in action.  Students spent time in three stations each class period -- small group, individual, games.  With my presence, we were able to add a fourth station -- technology.  Since it's really hard to get meaningful work done with four rotations a day, we rotated through the four stations over two days.

The big question at the time was WHAT technology to use.  We use Envision Math at our school, and they have a website with student activities. The original goal was to use that site for the tech station, but it just wasn't conducive for personalized learning. So, we went with MobyMax, a site I use with younger students.

What is great about MobyMax is its personalization.  Before you do any work in math, you take a placement test that figures out your holes in learning and gives you lessons to help fill those gaps. Another thing MobyMax does well is review math facts in an app called Fact Fluency.  However, as students continued learning missing skills, we realized there was obvious things missing with MobyMax.  For one, it lacks a lot of bells and whistles. While a second grader may not realize the difference, a fifth grader will visibly react to "the MobyMax voice" and less than optimum graphics.  Another thing that tripped us up was the lack of flexibility.  If a student bombed a kindergarten skill in the placement test, the only way to get past that skill was to go through all the lessons and practices -- even a retest didn't solve the problem.

We had to find something else.

Flexible Learning
Our simultaneous searching lead various places with great blogs and articles, but we hit pay dirt when Mrs. Justice found Mrs. Meehan's math website for a couple reasons.

For one, this led us to the Engage NY curriculum which is something Mrs. Justice was familiar with from her previous school.  She printed out the modules and used them to revamp her entire approach.  Students were assessed and given a starting point in the curriculum based on their assessments.  This helped students start exactly where they need to learning.

We also found the resources for blended learning page, and that opened my eyes to a whole new set of math websites I didn't know existed.  For now, we've landed on Zearn as a favorite.  In Zearn, students are placed in specific lessons by the teacher but are scaffolded through the process from there. Each lesson has warm-ups, fact practice, a video lesson, more practice, and a wrap up that will teach a particular skill. And, say good-bye to freaky voices.  Zearn has actors who play the part of teachers on their instructional videos.

That leads us to our next blended learning model, which I'll call flexible learning for lack of a better name.  Students are expected to learn in three modes:
1.  Small group instruction.  Some students are required to spend 10-20 minutes with Mrs. Justice each day.  Others are expected to check in face-to-face a couple times a week to make sure they are learning the new content.
2.  Individual work.  Students are given paper lessons to work on in class and are expected to complete 3-5 a week.  If questions arise, they can ask peers or a teacher for help. As mentioned above, students are given papers each week based on how they have performed on assessments so they are personalized to an extent.
3.  Technology.  While we really like Zearn, we also have left the door open for them to continue with MobyMax or use DreamBox (a site they had been using since the start of school). Each of these sites enable personalization based on performance and allow students to move at their own pace.

And the room looks different than it used to look too as evidenced by this panoramic picture I took.

Math Menu
Moving forward we want to work toward a math menu model, where students will be able to choose each day between main dishes, side dishes, and desserts.  These will include some of the pieces mentioned above but will also include creating and playing math games and creating and watching math videos to name a few.  We'd also like to open up a few other math programs to students as well. (Click the link for my most recent ideas.)

We are constantly reading up on new ideas, so if you have an idea, web site, or blog you could recommend, please send it my way!

2nd Grade Book Commercials

Inspired by this great article, I set out with Mrs. Zureick in second grade to make book commercial videos.  We hit some hiccups along the way, but I'm really happy with the final product and how we grew through the process.

Step One:  Selecting a video production tool.
In the article, Mr. Buetow's class used Adobe Spark for their videos. I immediately fell in love with Adobe Spark for its look and ease of use and wanted to run with it.  Sadly, Adobe has a 13 and over policy for its users.  We discussed the possibility of creating a generic school account that students could access. Sadly, that plan was not approved at the district office, so we had to look in other directions.

That search didn't take long at all. With three WeVideo projects under my belt, I felt comfortable using this platform.  While I would have liked the animated look from Adobe Spark, WeVideo is an excellent and easy program to use for 30 second video spots.  (Feel free to click here, here, and here to read about our previous projects.)

Step Two: Read the books and write the scripts.
I didn't help with this part of the project, but Mrs. Zureick's class spent a lot of time in the school library reading books that may interest younger students. Then, each student wrote up commercials for two books. Using markers, they created their own cue cards to read on camera.

Step Three: Getting pictures.
This turned out to be a minor hurdle to jump over. When I started working with the first two kids, I realized they needed to take pictures of illustrations in the books.  I spent a while trying to teach myself how to take a picture using a Chromebook webcam and get that saved into WeVideo on the fly (while wondering how I would teach it to 30 2nd graders) when it hit me that we have a small stack of iPads assigned to each grade level.

In the end, we took pictures with iPads, plugged the iPads into Chromebooks, then loaded them directly into WeVideo.  That added a couple hours to the project, but it worked just fine.

Step Four: Recording and editing the videos. 
When I started working with students on this project, we were in the library.  I loved the bookshelves in the background, so we made sure that all our "production studios" had a set of bookshelves we could use.

WeVideo is literally so easy a second grader can do it. As you'll see in the example videos at the end, we had three elements: a video of students talking, three pictures from the book, and background music.  Once we got cooking we could do multiple videos at one time and crank one out in less than 15 minutes.

As you can see in the picture, we tried to work in small teams.  I never felt that I had to have control of the Chromebook or the cue cards. I was quite fine with kids helping kids. It worked great! When I was being observed by my principal I made sure one of the best helpers was there working alongside me.  That was a positive part of the observation -- I had a protege working with me.

Step Five: Get rid of last names.
Our school policy is to not post student last names online.  Our librarian made the realization that WeVideo automatically displays the video creator's first and last name.  We had to scramble together notes home asking parents for permission to use the videos.  Just before we started deleting videos, WeVideo came through and showed us how to change the names. Whew!

Step Six: Publicize the videos.
The final step was to make these videos available to other students.  We are doing this two ways.  One, the links to all the videos will go into our school-wide computerized library catalog. So, when a student goes on the webpage for that book, she can view a video commercial about that book.  Two, QR Codes will be printed on labels and affixed to the inside cover of these books.  This will give students instant access to our book commercials.

As I wrap up, I'd like to thank a few people:

• Jesse Buetow not only wrote the article that gave this project life but was willing to answer questions for me from the outset. 
• Debbie Schroeder is our school librarian.  She's been on top of this project from the moment I sent the email out to the school. She's excited to get more videos created by more students. 
• Tina Zureick is not afraid to do something new and has invited me into her room on more than one occasion.
• The guys at WeVideo bailed me out of a jam. They were willing to help me with questions -- again -- that I could have probably answered myself if I didn't go into "freak out" mode. 

Here are a couple of videos for you to enjoy.