FREE iPad Apps in the Classroom

Posted on August 3, 2011 by Robert P.

I said I’d do this a long time ago, so here goes my quick 5 minute post on the iPad/iPod touch in the classroom. I’m not near my school iPads or iPods, so this will be a quick top 5.

DropBox
This is the most important app on my students’ iPods, as I can push any file I want to them. Currently, that means Google Forms for my students to fill out on the stories they are reading and the apps they are using, the songs we have been singing in Morning Meeting, and stories from OCR.

iTalk
iTalk is a voice recorder, where I have my students practice their fluency in the books, especially their leveled books. I also have them record themselves on Raz-kids.com, but the recording on that site are for me to listen to and do a running record on. iTalk recordings are for their own personal practice.

PuppetPals HD
Storyboarding practice for my students by creating a video using puppets and backgrounds. To get more puppets it costs more, but the basic one is free. To see it in action, check out this video of my students or read this EdWeek article.

Teacher’s Assistant Lite
While I own the paid version of this, the lite version allows you to keep track of behavior of up to five students. You can insert the behavior, consequence, who you contacted, and it automatically saves what time it occurred. You can then easily email that information to a parent, or as I do, use it to remind the student of the actions they took earlier in the day. Much easier than keeping it all in my head, I’ve got to say.

Evernote
Evernote allows me to keep an electronic portfolio of all my students’ work. This is especially helpful with the whiteboard desks in my classroom, but I can also use it to snap a photo of anything that I hope to hold onto for later use. I find this especially helpful when I’m visiting another teacher’s classroom and I really want to remember a chart or poster they have up in their room.

Let me know what you think and definitely contribute your own!

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A Quick Peek into my Classroom Layout

Posted on August 2, 2011 by Robert P.

circa summer 2010

I noticed #4thchat today was talking about classroom layout, so I thought I would quickly write about mine. My classroom was packed and had many different areas until Jenna talked me into Feng Shui for my room. A basic bagua is basically how we arranged my classroom. That, and the other big part of Feng Shui – decluttering.

It was a huge relief to get so much unnecessary stuff out of my classroom, or at least out of the way. In addition, I can see in every corner of my classroom from any spot in my classroom, which is important to me safety-wise.

As you can see in the panorama (as though you are entering the classroom door), the classroom is basically wide open. That means within 3 minutes we can move all the desks to the walls for a morning meeting with all the second grade classes, we can move desks into “testing position” for spelling assessments and CSTs, or we could move the desks slightly to fit everyone at the whiteboard for an interactive lesson.

The library is it’s own corner, with the aquarium next to it (both seem to be a calm/serene area for students to take a break if they feel they need one). The textbooks are now actually covered with fabric, as are the math tools near the rainbow rug. Makes the class feel even less cluttered, which seems to make classroom management even easier.

There is a set of blue bins near the back table where I store any old assignments and current/future assignments. There is also an In Box for all their completed work and a Book Hospital for all those books that have been loved a little too much.

Also, you might have noticed that there are not beautiful colorful borders around the bulletin boards, but just sentence strips. At the beginning of each year, I have my students write their goals for the year on sentence strips and put them around the most relevant bulletin boards in the classroom. That way, before any work has even gone up, students have ownership of the classroom walls.

As you can see, these photos were taken before I painted all the desks with IdeaPaint and turned them (and the door and back table) into whiteboards, but it’s basically how my classroom looks now. And yes, no teacher desk. I’m either at the rug, the whiteboard, roaming the room, or teaching a small group at the back table, and all my supplies are stored in the drawers next to the back table, so I don’t feel I need a desk for any purpose. Again, my classroom has changed in the year since I took these photos, but for anyone wanting to peek inside a classroom, have a look.

Our Guided Reading Library

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A Twitter Name Change

Posted on July 29, 2011 by Robert P.

After reading @JennBrokofsky’s post and following @KarynTeaches’s name change, I’ve decided to make a Twitter name change of my own.

Why? Basically the same reason as Jenn… to better connect my in-person persona with my twitter persona. I started speaking at conferences a year ago and had to add my Twitter name to my slides in order to make the connection for those who follow me online. Now, by switching from @teach24_7 to @Pronovost, I have no strong need to add that tag to my presentations, business cards, and emails for others to make the same connection. Of course, I may still add @Pronovost to the bottom of my business card, but the only problem I have to worry about now is someone misspelling my last name. Unfortunately, my high school principal mispronounced it at graduation, my current school district misspelled it for my first district email address, and so many tend to mentally shorten the name to provost.

Just remember, this Pro says No boast. Err, Vost. Well, at least you can know you’re not the only one to have had trouble saying the name.

@pronovost

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Saving Paper, One Desk At A Time!

Posted on April 22, 2011 by Robert P.

On the eve of Earth Day, I thought it would be a fitting time to reflect on our newest innovation in our classroom: whiteboard desks.

This is a project I envisioned last summer, when I had a three-day professional development at the Stanford d.school (design school) and saw their whiteboard room. While many things came out of that PD (duct tape wallets/coat/ties, brainstorming in inquiry groups, prototyping behavior plans and lessons), the whiteboard dream was definitely the most ambitious.

After getting the paint (IdeaPaint) funded on DonorsChoose.org, I tested the plan with my guided reading table, classroom door, and three desks. The test phase went very well. Wear-and-tear was minimal, student engagement was increased as was their production.  I took my first few hours of Spring Break to paint all the desks and left them to dry over the break. This has been the first week with everyone using their whiteboard desks and it has definitely encouraged a lot more writing!

Poetry, letters to parents for Open House, math problems, and even brainstorming ideas for our games project with Rock Our World. We’ll see tomorrow if we can go paperless for the day and use our whiteboards in even more innovative ways!

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Peace In Our Classroom (Reflections on #cue11)

Posted on April 6, 2011 by Robert P.

Listening to Carol Anne McGuire and Peter H. Reynolds talk about the past season of Rock Our World made me think about what ROW meant to me and my students this past fall.

Of course, my first season of ROW was a learning experience for all of us, trying to figure out how GarageBand and Animation-ish worked, how to save the files, how to access the iDisk, and how to chat with classes around the world.  It was fun to learn alongside my students, since I think it helped my students understand that sometimes the teacher doesn’t know all the answers. Sometimes, the students knows more than teacher, as became the case in using Animation-ish.

Peace was the focus of season 13 of ROW. Peace was also a necessary focus in our classroom, as it felt like we would never reach peace in our classroom. My students quickly incorporated “ish” into their discussions of peace and into their daily language. “Don’t squish my ish!” became a common saying in our classroom. “I think everyone knows how to make their own ish” was said by one student during an abstract art project.

The culmination of the season was the webcast of the ROW International Family Night. We had at least half of our families there, many teachers, administrators, and even some of my own friends and family. That night, while a learning experience for all my students on public speaking and a learning experience for myself on having multiple students prepared to speak, was incredible.  Not only did we share with the world and the world shared with us, but my students were teaching their parents, siblings, and other teachers how to use all the technology they use day-to-day in the classroom.

I think that is what leads to peace in the classroom: every person knowing they are able to contribute in a special way. As that one student still says, “I think everyone knows how to make their own ish.” And everyone’s ish is unique and important.

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Individual Sessions & Keynotes (My Reflections About #CUE11)

Posted on March 29, 2011 by Robert P.

Definitely been busy since CUE11, so I’m glad I can finally sit down to reflect on my experience in Palm Springs. To really think things through, I’ll reflect on each session as I browse my notes before reflecting on the conference as a whole:

Creativity is the Killer App – Chris Walsh
My overall take from this session is that I need to get my students’ creativity flowing in as many different fields as possible, most especially outdoors. I need to use some of Chris’s ideas along with those of Diane Main to get my students exploring the outdoors with and without technology. I took a design thinking course this past summer, but need to apply it more within the classroom to extend our learning beyond our physical walls and typical activities. How I’m going to do that (beyond some geocaching) is beyond me.

Engagement, Differentiation, and RTI with iPad – Ms. Terri Price
I realized I’m around the “Progressing Evolution” stage of integrating iPods in the classroom according to the speaker’s stages of evolution. I think I’m actually going to move beyond this by starting the QR codes in my classroom. More on that later, but it’s the part my students seem to be most excited about.
103 Ideas to Integrate Technology In the Elementary Classroom – Gary Garfield, Suzanne McDonough
The one thing I took from this session is integrating physical activity into the rest of class. In their case, the 4th grade class compiled the miles they ran toward reaching the next California mission. Not sure how or if I can integrate this, but it is a creative idea to encourage physical activity while building excitement in the curriculum.
Carol Anne McGuire’s Keynote – Whole other blog post coming.
Michael Horn’s Keynote
This just made me think about Rocketship Education’s model of blended learning in a more serious way. Most of our district just opposed bringing Rocketship in because it’s “not innovative” and not “likely to succeed”. Much of the same way that the incumbents in any field speak about those Disruptive Innovations that come along. Think about how there was “no market” for the tablet before the iPad came out and many PC companies tried to fight it at first. Unfortunately, in education, it should be about the kids, not the incumbents or the adults.
iPods, iPads & Macs, Oh My! How to Manage a Hybrid World – Sandy Brenner and Josh Rude, along with Michael Wells
I learned about iOS profiles that you can create using the iPhone Configuration Utility. This is going to save me a lot of time. I can simply ask students to open a profile (through Dropbox, I hope) and enable or disable certain parts of the iPod without working on each one individually.
Connect With The Connected (my presentation… more appropriately titled “A Sneak Peek Into My Second Grade Classroom“)- Another post, but I do have a few things to say…
Thanks greatly to those who stopped during their busy day, especially Jen Wagner, Jan Sterns, and Sue Allen. I met Jen at TCEA, where I had a great dinner with her and a few others. She was extremely supportive during my presentation, always smiling and sending the good vibes. Jan ran my session, so I am extremely grateful to her. Sue is our district Technology Coordinator, who found some money to pay for part of my trip. It was great to share my classroom tools with her, since I know she is always working on developing the technological prowess of teachers in our district.
Developing Student Collaboration Skills with Google Docs – Chris Bell, Jim Sill
Only was in this session for about 20 minutes after wandering through some other so-so sessions, but learned so much. I came out of this session excited to use Google Docs more often in my classroom. Also, I know that there is so much more for me to learn about Google Docs. Anyone want to tutor me or pass along some helpful sites?
Destroying “Death By Powerpoint” (also know by its official title: Producing Powerful and Effective Presentations) – Ken Shelton
While I think I already knew most of what Ken was sharing and try to make presentations in the same fashion, I mainly attended this one to hear from such a powerful voice in my virtual PLN. He was an extremely great and effective presenter himself and I came away with two key learnings: Reading slides as they are being presented makes the information harder to process, and you need to put yourself in the audience’s place before you ever think your presentation is ready. He also motivated me to start Project 365, so be watching for some photography to begin to grace my blog. (Maybe this will get me to post more often!)
Leslie Fisher’s Keynote
Just got some good ideas on technology to use in the classroom. Nothing that will alter my teaching much though.
Well, hopefully tomorrow I can get to an actual reflection on my conversations and the conference as a whole. In other words, more (and better) insights to come.
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Good morning! Malo tau ma’u e pongipongi ni! (Open Sourcing My Classroom)

Posted on March 15, 2011 by Robert P.

During the months of August to December, I had the honor of having a teacher candidate (also known as a student teacher) from Stanford University’s School of Education in my classroom three days a week.

While I didn’t keep my Open Sourcing posts going, I did get to experience open sourcing my classroom to the latest ideas and pedagogies.  I wish I had the time to recall and reflect on everything we tried in the classroom, but one thing I did want to publicly reflect on was the modifications we made to our Morning Meeting.

Specifically, following matt tudor’s recommendations and the suggestions of the TC in my room, we began to say good morning to each other in different languages. While it was one language a week, we have now paused at eight foreign languages. We probably could add more, but I want each to be meaningful and purposeful, otherwise we could just go on learning a new language a week and never stop to think about the languages we’ve learned.

Spanish and Tongan are our students’ native languages. Athabaskan is my tribe’s (Siletz) native language. (My tribe’s native language lacked greeting similar to ‘good morning’, so we settled on “Shay La”, or “hello”.)  Our TC studied abroad in Russia, so Russian was also added. So many of our students have a curiosity in Chinese, so we added “Ts’ow ahn”. Our TC added Swahili and Arabic to really add to the regions of the world we are familiar with in our classroom.

While the greeting takes no more than five minutes, it has seemed to have a much larger effect on our classroom. We are able to refer to it to talk about how we refer to and treat other cultures and languages. It wasn’t immediate, but looking at the trends in our classroom, the comments about other cultures have moved in a very positive direction.

Trust me, being able to discuss the disasters in Japan is definitely made easier without students mocking the people who have been affected. Our discussions the past few days never would’ve been so meaningful had we not implemented our multilingual greeting.

Big thanks to Matt and our TC… and if any of you are interested in implementing this in your classroom, you can start by reading aloud Children of the World Say “Good Morning” by Herbert McClure. I haven’t read it to our class yet, but I think I’ll be reading it next Monday, along with a new greeting, “O-ha-yo”.

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Open Sourcing update.

Posted on March 4, 2011 by Robert P.

To make this simple, I fell away from updating once the school year began, due to the ridiculousness that is teaching. I tried to implement the very limited feedback I got on open sourcing my classroom, but fell from that too due to not hearing from others.

I guess that’s my fault for not updating this enough. So I’m back. And I will be sharing all the great things we’ve been working on in our classroom. I’ll try to limit it to one tool at a time, to make the posts easier to digest. I’ll start off sometime this week with a post about our attempt to integrate the comments I received from my Open Sourcing posts at the beginning of the year.

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Living a Writerly Life

Posted on August 16, 2010 by Robert P.

I’ve been taking a Writer’s Workshop training this past week. Happens to be the third time I’ve been trained in it, but I’ve actually begun applying a lot of the writing advice to my own writing (for the first time)!

I thought I’d share my writing that came out of this workshop. It was based on years of mowing the lawn when I really despised it. Hope you enjoy and feel free to leave comments!

“Mowing the Lawn”

Mowing became an art form when done right. But most of the time, it was a series of problems.

Mower won’t start.

Where’s the bag? The cd player died. The lawnmower died.

Someone didn’t scoop poop! That was Nick’s job. Or was it Matt’s? Regardless, it wasn’t mine. Oh well, it’s in the mower now.

Why am I wearing my nice sneakers? That freshly cut grass is staining my shoes green… and slightly brown. Gross! What if a friend rode by? They’d like my shoes. Well, they would’ve liked my shoes, before today.

Opening the gate. Emptying the bag. Trying to quickly navigate around the large oak tree while still keeping their crisp, just mowed, rows of cut grass.

Silly allergies. Stinking allergies! Now wasps? What wouldn’t this tree do to ruin my day? Oh, new roots… didn’t think of that. Guess it outsmarted me again. One day that tree will be gone and my troubles will be gone. Gone far away, with the unscooped poop and the stained green shoes.

Oh no. Water? Who flooded the last strip of grass with water? Must’ve been that tree. Whatever. I’m finished. Who cares about the ugly, muddy strips of grass by the garage? Not me.

Empty the bag. Put the mower back. Finished!

What, not good enough? Fine, let me get the mower.

Mower won’t start.

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Writer’s Workshop (Open Souring My Classroom)

Posted on August 9, 2010 by Robert P.

Sitting in my professional development on Writer’s Workshop and I’m thinking about how I have taught writing in my classroom in the past. I feel I have taught and developed a couple of units a year decently well, but have never had great PD or mentor to show me how to really develop a writer’s workshop unit. Which means that those units have had a backbone of the genre we are working in and the focus we are taking, but the details have never been carefully crafted and the wrap-ups of the units have often extended beyond what I thought was a reasonable timeline.

I had Writer’s Workshop training in grad school, read Katie Wood Ray’s book, used the NOYCE narrative writing unit, and taught my own expository unit each year, but still don’t feel I know where to start and how to craft a unit well. Does anyone have any resources, tips, or ideas that could help me in my quest to be a good writing teacher? In addition, does anyone incorporate Step Up to Writing or any other writing curriculums in tandem with Writer’s Workshop?

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