Visual Data

  I used Microsoft Word to create a visual representation of 100 third grade students’ beginning of the year math pre-test scores versus their beginning of the year writing pre-test scores. I did not know that you could create graphs in Word, but it is a very easy program to use and makes many different kinds of charts and graphs.

On my graphs, the X-axis represents a student’s score on the beginning of the year math test. The highest possible score is a 100.

The Y-axis represents a student’s score on the beginning of the year writing sample. The highest possible score is a 24.

Every diamond is a student in third grade at my school.

Sometimes we unintentionally place kids in boxes. (These are high kids across the board: these are low kids across the board.)

We expect our students’ test scores to look like this:

This is what my third grade students’ test scores actually look like:

I wanted to see if students who are high in math might not necessarily be high in writing and visa versa. The range is much wider than we believe it to be. There are students who scored at an 85% on the math, but only got a 12 on the writing. There are also students who scored 19 on the writing, but only 24% on the math.

I think that the scatterplot below does a great job of showing that the coloration between math test scores and writing test scores is not as close as we sometimes believe it to be. It is also easy to see the outliers in the data: students who scored very high or very low on one of the tests.

Data Visualization

The data visualization resource I explored was Wordle.net. This website creates word clouds. The essential learning I gained from exploring this site is that images and words are not mutually exclusive; they can be combined. You can have an image created from words. This is a concept I can’t wait to share with my students. Kids (and people in general) try to fit things in neat little boxes (one box for words, one box for images), and this will blow that thought process out of the water!

My school is very big this year on 60 second questions. This attempts to incorporate more writing into all content areas. It begins when students are given a prompt. For example, I might tell my kids to list every word that they think goes with the human skeleton. Students need to spend the entire 60 seconds writing. Their pencil cannot stop moving. This is a good activity to activate background knowledge. Then the students share what they have written.

I would use this 60 second question in combination with Wordle.net instead of a KWL at the beginning of a unit. I would collect the students’ responses and input them into Wordle. The words that more students came up with would appear larger. At the beginning of the unit I would expect most students to put words like bone, skull, rib cage. Then after we have spent several months learning about the human skeleton we will do this activity again and see how different our word cloud looks now that we have a greater understanding of the topic. This shows students how much their understanding of the human skeleton has changed from the beginning to the end of the unit and it is really making them aware of their own learning. We can display these word clouds in our classroom to remind us of what we have learned and show how much we have learned.

Ways to Incorporate Multimedia in Lessons

Ways to Incorporate Multimedia in Lessons
21st Century Skills	Interactive Whiteboards	Student Response Systems
Classroom website for parents and students to access school information and classroom content	Interactive review games before a unit test	Formative assessment exit ticket question at the end of a lesson
Collaborating using Google Docs or Edmoto	Project and annotate examples of student work	Teaching graphing in math (poll the class on a topic)
Video tape student presentations on iPads	Discovery Education or Youtube videos	Checks for understanding throughout the lesson
Having a class blog	Sing along songs to learn new content (example: 50 states song)	Give students choice throughout the lesson
Using Storybird or Webspiration for student presentations	Save screen shots of lessons to post on class website for students to reference later	“Raising your hand” with no risk of being embarrassed if you get the wrong answer Also, students aren’t influenced by their peers (my friend is voting for this one, so I will too)

21st Century Skill Lesson Ideas

Critical Thinking and Problem Solving

Use Systems Thinking

Analyze how parts of a whole interact with each other to produce overall outcomes in complex system.

In third grade we study the skeletal system, which is one of the most complex systems we could possibly study. As an anticipatory set to the unit, each student is assigned a bone in the human body. They use the Internet and e-books to study that bone. Then we could do a jigsaw style presentation so that every student in the class has heard a little bit about every bone in the body, while only researching one specific bone. Then we discuss how all the bones work together with our muscles, tendons, and joints, to form our working and moving skeleton.  

Creativity and Innovation

Work Creatively with Others
Develop, implement and communicate new ideas to others effectively

We do a unit on early explorers. I could assign every group a specific explorer and it is their job to work together to come up with a way to present information about their explorer to the class. I am completely leaving it up to them on what kind of project they do. Some examples I could give include creating a poster, a power point, a board game, writing a song or poem, doing a skit, or even sock puppets. Then they get to present their project.

ICT Literacy

Apply Technology Effectively
Use technology as a tool to research, organize, evaluate and communicate information.

We study non-fiction text and text features in language arts. A culminating end of unit project for this is a research biography essay. Students get to select any person they want (as long as there is information published about them) and they get to research on iPads about their person. Then they write an essay (with a lot of scaffolding.) Lastly, they get to dress up like their person and I will video tape them giving clues about their person in first person. For example they could say, “I wrote the book Harry Potter and the Sorcerers’ stone.”  All the parents and students watch the videos and get to guess whom each student is portraying.

Life and Career Skills

Initiative and Self-Direction - Manage Goals and Time
Set goals with tangible and intangible success criteria

At the beginning of the school year (and throughout the year) my students and I have a lot of discussions about setting goals. We talk about personal goals like getting exercise every day, academic goals like memorizing all my math facts, and behavioral goals like not talking in the hallways. Then as a reminder of these goals we set, we do a creative project. I take pictures of all the students using my iPad and I print them. The students cut around themselves and then create an artistic expression of their goals they have set for themselves. For example, one student drew themselves holding onto a bunch of balloons with one goal written in each balloon. They explained that they were soaring through the sky towards their goals. Then I publish these projects on our website so we can all keep each other accountable for our goals. 

Interactive Whiteboards

I think that any subject area can use interactive whiteboards. Some subjects are harder to incorporate, but it is definitely possible. My evidence is all of the subjects I have seen use them successfully. I have seen PE teachers us them to teach the rules of football, language arts teachers use them for grammar, and everything in between.

I have never personally used an interactive whiteboard. My charter school is just 2 years old, and we did not even consider this particular technology for our school because the technology committee felt that there were better, more up-to-date technologies available. For example, software that allows your iPad to communicate with your projector. With this technology, I can walk around the room and be writing on the board (via a stylus on my iPad) simultaneously. This is fantastic because it allows me to have proximity to my students that need redirecting and not be stuck at the front of the room teaching from the whiteboard. This helps my student engagement. My students are always very entertained by me “magically” writing on the board. This software and interactive whiteboard replacement is a fantastic program, but it takes a while and quite a bit of training to be able to use comfortably. There are just so many features to get to know.

         I have used clickers as a student in high school and thought it was a really cool program, but I have not used it as a teacher. I would think that it gives great instant feedback and it would work well as a paperless exit slip.