July 2014 Reader on Coding in Education

I'm so glad that there's no shortage of new resources and articles on this critical subject!

NYC’s Flatiron School Raises $5.5 Million To Teach People To Code For A Living [TechCrunch]

Game Maven Teaches You How to Code While Making Games [Lifehacker]

Mozilla Webmaker Teaches You to Build Web Sites, Apps, and More [Lifehacker]

YC-Backed CodeCombat Wants You To Learn To Code By Playing Games [TechCrunch] - I sense a trend.

Roominate, Play-i, Robot Turtles and Littlebits Shake Up the Toy Industry [Inc magazine] - I'd love to see these toys in early education and elementary classrooms!

Spring Break 2014 Reader on Coding in Education

With 11K Pre-Orders, Play-i Lands $8M To Teach Kids To Code With Interactive Toy Robots [TechCrunch] - Coming soon! This is an exciting development. I heard a recent TED talk adapted for NPR about how robots change the way we react to technology, including how we end up personifying and thus engaging at a more meaningful level with them than other tech. What Play-i is aiming for rings true with that in mind.

3-Year-Olds Can Learn to Code — One Robot Turtle at a Time [Mashable] - The Logo programming (with its ubiquitous turtle) that I used to do on my Apple IIc had to have been part of the inspiration for this real world board game.

Why We Need Coding Clubs for Girls [GOOD]

Getting Girls Into Programming, One Children’s Book At A Time [TechCrunch]

Proof the Next Great App Could Come From a Kid [Mashable]

Weekend Reader: New Ideas For The Arts In The Classroom

How To Introduce Kids To Tough Topics? Art And TV Can Help [NPR]

Integrating Arts and Tech Simultaneously: Four Lesson Ideas [The Inspired Classroom] - Great interdisciplinary ideas!

We Should Probably Turn Textbooks Into Comic Books [GOOD]

Powerful Opportunities for Content Creation & Publication in the Digital Classroom [The 21st Century Principal] - In short, let's use digital content creation as a ways to get kids engaged with the arts--writing, art, etc.

Stories aim to grow interest in math [ABQJournal Online]

Weekend Reader on Community Service in Education

Let Students Design Their Own Social Change Projects [GOOD]

Blake Kernen: The Case for Community Service [HuffPo]

3 Ways to Use Microcredit to Invest Your Students [This blog]

The Complete Guide to Service Learning: Proven, Practical Ways to Engage Students in Civic Responsibility, Academic Curriculum, & Social Action [Amazon] - A practical guidebook on how to incorporate service learning into your classroom.

What the Designated Drivers Campaign Can Teach Those in the Youth Service Movement [GOOD] - Finally, a reminder that we need to sell our students (and likely our schools and districts) on service learning to get them involved. It won't always happen organically.

Weekend Reader on Entrepreneurship in Schools

Fishtree Blog — The Skills of Tomorrow Public speaking. [Fishtree blog via GOOD] - The author discusses whether entrepreneurship should be taught in schools.

3 Ways Schools Can Encourage Student Entrepreneurship [Edudemic]

Teach Your Kids the Value of Money with a Job Board [Lifehacker] - Teaching kids the value of work (and money) is a great way to set them on an entrepreneurial path.

How to Educate Next Generation of Entrepreneurs? Start by Reviving Financial Literacy [GOOD]

KidLead - A leadership training curriculum for kids ages 6-9. Leadership and entrepreneurship go hand in hand.

Basics of Quadratic Functions iPad (Tablet) Project

For the last few years, when my students were learning about the graphs of simple quadratic functions (usually ones in the form y = ax² + c), they would make posters of quadratic equations and label key parts.  As we discussed solving quadratic equations by graphing, students would make posters explaining the process. 

Last year, I combined these projects using the iPads our students had available:

BASICS OF QUADRATIC FUNCTIONS IPAD PROJECT

1. Create a Keynote presentation or video that shows 2 quadratic equations and their graphs (one that opens up and one that opens down).
2. Label these parts:
   
   1. Vertex
   2. Axis of symmetry
   3. Roots/zeros (if any)
   4. Minimum or maximum
3. Show how to tell if a graph opens up or down just from the equation.
4. Show how to find the vertex using the calculator.
5. Show how to find the zeros/roots using the calculator.

As with the adaptable iPad project I shared last week, you could also give students the option of using the fantastic Educreations app.

Essentially this is the same project as those simple posters, but it utilizes the technology we had available in a meaningful way. While I would never want to replace every low or no-tech project I use, it's always important to take advantage of the resources you have.

A Brief Collection of Critical Topics Missing From Most Curricula, Part 2

Entrepreneurship: Rise of the Mini-Preneurs: A Kid-Run Virtual Lemonade Stand To Teach Entrepreneurship [GOOD]

Independence: Hacking the Classroom to Encourage Student Independence [THE Journal]

Financial literacy: Moneythink: Giving a Handup (Not a Handout) With Financial Literacy Skills [GOOD]

Basic electronics: How to Get Started with DIY Electronics Projects [Lifehacker]

Coding: A Videogame That Teaches Kids To Code [Fast Company Co:Design] - See the game's trailer below.


See the original post, A Brief Collection of Critical Topics Missing From Most Curricula.

Don't Stop Trying Bold New Ideas, Even When You Fail

Right before school started last fall, I made a list of several new ideas I wanted to try out in the year ahead.  Some of them had been ruminating in my mind for years, and I felt that I had a unique opportunity in a new situation to build the classroom I had always wanted.  Here is the list:

1. ACT/SAT Question of the day? Week?
2. Blended learning - sort of. Khan Academy etc Study Island??
3. Facebook page
4. Group work products - Complex Inst principles - butcher paper
5. Meaningful homework - Use word wall: over the course of the six weeks, students will produce (illustrated guide / puzzle / children's book / song etc) something for all words.  Math puzzles from Professor Stewart's Cabinet of Mathematical Curiosities by Ian Stewart
6. Experiment with IWB - Battleship!!
7. Use PI office to get guest speakers
8. Make infographics into posters- college, education, health, poverty etc

I just rediscovered this over the weekend and realized I accomplished only a couple of these things.  I incorporated Khan Academy into my curriculum, I created Facebook pages for my classes, and at the very beginning of the year I used some puzzles from Dr. Stewart's book as an icebreaker.  I didn't do any of those things particularly well either.  The other ideas disappeared into the ether of a typically busy school year.

Yet despite my failure to successfully implement these ideas, I won't hesitate to tell you that you should never stop trying new things to improve your teaching.  The minute you lose your desire to get better, to struggle to improve, you might as well start looking for a new career.

A few weeks age I told you to make a list of things you need to do better in the future before you forget them.  Consider this an addendum: make a big list of bold new things you want to try out next year.  Better yet, research good ideas over the summer and then make a list just before school starts.

What kind of things would be on your list?  I'd love to read them in the comments.

Mind Mapping for Teachers, Part 4: Improving Research

This is the final part of a guest series on mind mapping by Hobie Swan, a professional writer from Boise, ID. Mr. Swan is interested in helping teachers find ways to incorporate this strategy into the classroom.

Article 4: Using mind mapping for research
If you have had a chance to read the other articles in this series, you will have noticed that there are a few things that are unique to mind mapping. These include:

• The ability to easily combine many information types in one document
• The natural proclivity toward information chunking
• The ability to get a birds’ eye view of information—and to drill down to details.

Each of these qualities can be a big help when conducting research.

Combining information types
As I said before, mind maps make it easy to combine URLs, images, video, audio, and ideas in one document. The resulting “information object” truly reflects the state of information in the 21st century. For all the advances that have been made in technology, the average research still resembles something created in the middle of the 20th century: pages of type, maybe with an occasional image or graph, the obligatory footnotes, citations, etc. It’s kind of dry—especially for today’s students who live in a very rich media world.

But this isn’t simply a matter of form. The goal is to help students learn. I can remember as a kid having to do a “report” on Mexico. All it really involved was collecting what I recall as almost a foot-tall stack of pamphlets, articles, and tourist brochures. It wasn’t about interacting with the information. It was about seeing how much you could collect.

With mind maps, you can collect a staggering amount of information because you can quickly hide all but the small portion you want to deal with at any given moment. But what is different about mind mapping is that you can hide 99% of this information and concentrate on the 1% you need to focus on at any given moment. Furthermore, the visual nature of the mind map interface enables you to navigate effortlessly from one information point to another, inserting your comments adjacent to each “chunk” of information in the map.

Download the full example lesson via Google Docs.

Final note
I hope that this series of articles has got you thinking about providing your students—and yourself—with a tool that matches the way the human mind prefers to work. Unlike more linear tools, mind mapping allows users to cast their nets widely—to brainstorm and capture all of their thinking on a topic. By supporting the natural movement from divergent to convergent thinking, mind mapping keeps students from getting trapped at the start is overly narrow lines of investigation.

Mind mapping then provides users with a way to rapidly combine into one document many kinds of information—and to add to that pre-existing data their interpretations of and insights about that information. You and your students can build these fantastically complex and complete information objects. Then they can choose to restrict the information view and concentrate on one point at a time.

Finally (and this may seem trivial), mind mapping give students the ability to add creativity to the often tedious process of conducting research. By changing fonts, adding icons (like the lit bomb on the branch about ethnic cleansing), and inserting photos or clip art, students can in a way personalize their information gathering. This simple step of adding visual interest to a body of information adds a personal dimension to what is often a very impersonal process. And it can help student create visual cues that will draw their interest and attention immediately back to key information.

I said this before in this series, but I think it bears repeating: Today’s students swim in a multimedia world the likes of which few teaches experienced at such an early age. By providing students with a tool they can use to recapture some of the “polymorphous perversity” of the modern information landscape, teachers can enliven the education process, making learning more creative, thoughtful and, dare I say it… fun.

Hobart Swan is a professional writer who has worked with mind mapping tools and companies for the past 20 years. To see an example of a book Swan organized using mind mapping, visit www.cancercode.com. Swan has worked for two leading mind mapping companies, CS Odessa, maker of ConceptDraw MINDMAP, and Mindjet, maker of MindManager.

Read the other entries in the series:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Chunking of Language
Part 3: Improving Student Writing

Mind Mapping for Teachers, Part 3: Improving Student Writing

This is the third part of a week-long series of guest posts on mind mapping by Hobie Swan, a professional writer from Boise, ID. Mr. Swan is interested in helping teachers find ways to incorporate this strategy into the classroom. This part focuses on improving student writing.

Students swim in media-rich waters
One of the keys to good writing is good preparation. But rare is the student who loves to dig into that most important of preparatory documents: the outline. I tend to think of it more as a “pre-writing document.” When most people think of outlines, they imagine line upon line of text. A pre-writing document is something more befitting the resources students have at their disposal these days.

Kids live in a media- and information-soaked culture. To require them to work in a landscape dominated by text may seem to some akin to carving their thoughts on the tusk of a whale. More appropriate--at least for the pre-writing phase--may be to give them the tools to create rich, multimedia aggregations of insights, images, and information. As I will explain, this may require no more than giving them access to a single mind-mapping application.

Start with divergent thinking
Creation of the standard outline may well be a prime cause of the dreaded blank page syndrome. Even the most seasoned writer can falter when faced with the gaping maw of a blank screen. What, the emptiness taunts, is that one very first thing you want to address. It’s too much pressure. Who know what they want to think of first, then second, then third.

A new mind map, while still nearly blank, offers one small, lifeboat-shaped haven. In the center is a small shape into which you can enter a word or two to describe the purpose of the map.

Let’s call this map: Memoir. For this writing assignment, you have asked your students to write something about a memorable event in their lives.

This might still seem intimidating until the student realizes that they don’t have to start a numbered list of their thoughts, with the first one on tope, followed by the second, third, etc.—proceeding in a relentlessly linear way until they reach The End.

Instead, your first suggestion to your students can be for them to think of some memorable event and just start brainstorming: jotting down ideas as they pop up in their brains:

Many students I’ve talked to say that the ability to add images helps make the assignment for fun, more engaging. Being able to just quickly jot down ideas makes the process more open and creative. And that can lead to new insights. See how in the next map the student has begun to interact with his or her idea.

Move on to convergent thinking
Mind mapping is a great way to get students’ minds thinking. By first being able to just think random thoughts, they can feel less constrained. They can let their minds wander as they please in and around the topic at hand.

Usually, this allows a main thesis to emerge—and for less important or unrelated ideas to depart. In this example, seeing all of the ideas on one screen has given the student insight into what exactly he or she is thinking about. In this case, the student seems most interested in the teacher, and how he or she made the year so memorable:

 

The student has dragged and dropped the branches from his first use of the map, added some new ideas and, in the process, and converged their thoughts on one main idea.

Mind mapping methodology allows room for this kind of divergent-to-convergent thinking that is often missing in student writing.

Now to form an organized whole
Once some ideas have been captured and perhaps an inkling of insight gained, it is time to leave the free thought behind and start creating a logical structure for the ideas and information that will make up the final writing. Some mind mapping products (and again, ConceptDraw is one such product) allow users to see or to export the map contents in more traditional outline form:

If the student so chooses, he or she can simply push a button to export the map as a traditional outline, and continue the writing process:

It is fair to say, though, that once your students (or you yourself) get used to working in this more concise, visual way, they may be more inclined to continue to flesh out their ideas right in the map:

… knowing that at any point they can export what they’ve written as a working outline:

One example among many
I’ve used a creative writing assignment as the topic. Regardless of the topic and hand, mind mapping’s ability to integrate multimedia and interactivity allow students to work much more quickly, intuitively and, I would argue, more creatively.

As I noted in the first article in this series, ConceptDraw MINDMAP enables users to embed hyperlinks, images, multimedia, and graphics into a pre-writing document. Students can browse the Internet, link to research resources, and then combine online information with information from other sources—including their own ideas—to enable them to do the kind of preparation that can lead to more reasoned arguments and less head-scratching on the part of teachers.

And again, mind mapping enables students to work in a very information-rich way, with access to all the many forms that information comes in these days. That includes everything from websites, to images and icons, to YouTube videos and information clipped from Facebook or Twitter. Most important of all, mind mapping is designed to help people collect all of this rich information—and then add to it their own insights, reactions, and observations of that information.

It is in delivering a true 21st century mixture of pre-existing information and new ideas that mind mapping shines.

Read the other entries in the series:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: The Chunking of Language
Part 4: Improving Research

Mind Mapping for Teachers, Part 2: Chunking of Language

This is the second part of a week-long series of guest posts on mind mapping by Hobie Swan, a professional writer from Boise, ID. Mr. Swan is interested in helping teachers find ways to incorporate this strategy into the classroom.

As I writer, I can easily bristle at the idea of our trading in the well-crafted sentence for a few well-considered words. If it wasn’t so handy, I’d be a lot more resistant to this practice. But because of the visual nature of a mind map, people tend to use words much more sparingly that they do when writing a document (such as the one you’re reading right now that may seem to be droning on and on). What might otherwise take a paragraph to communicate can be done using just a sentence or phrase--maybe even in one single word--when you mind map.

This makes the information in the map:

1. More easily understood: Children for whom English is not their native language, with dyslexia, or low literally levels often find it far easier to understand what is being communicated—and more able to interact with the information.
2. Contexually powerful: Because of the spatial nature of a map, the viewer finds context by seeing where a concept is relative to its neighbors. Communicating without these visual cues means that all meaning must be expressed using words—and we are back to the multi-page document.
3. Concise: Because the map is built with individual branches made up of a few words and maybe an image or icon, it’s possible to capture up to 10 or so pages of writing in one map. The ability to see all of the information in one view improves the ability to interact with that information. Note: Map branches can be “collapsed” so that the document isn’t cluttered with information you don’t need at any given moment.
4. Quickly digested: You plow through a written report. You scan a map.
5. Flexible: I’ll discuss this further in the article about writing. The main point is that by capturing information onto individual branches, the information can be quickly and easily dragged and dropped into similar groups, chronological order, or any other arrangement that best suites the current objective.

The one thing I don’t dare put on a list like this, for fear of trivializing mind mapping, is that the way of capturing, organizing and sharing information is much more fun and engaging than simple “writing a report.”

Today’s students live in a world filled with motion and images. For many of them, nothing could be more boring that having to reduce all of that excitement and action to “a page and a half” of writing. But turn them loose with a mind map, in which they can quickly capture and organize elements of the information sea in which they swim, and you may be surprised at what they come up with.

Read the other entries in the series:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 3: Improving Student Writing
Part 4: Improving Research

Mind Mapping for Teachers, Part 1

This is the first in a week-long series of guest posts on mind mapping by Hobie Swan, a professional writer from Boise, ID.  Mr. Swan is interested in helping teachers find ways to incorporate this strategy into the classroom.

Screen capture of an example "starter" mind map (ConceptDraw MINDMAP software)

In this multi-part series I will describe a few ways to use mind mapping in teaching. I will talk about how teachers can use mind mapping to make their work easier and clearer, and how students can use mind mapping to help them organize thoughts and information.

The three uses I will describe are:

1. To create multimedia lesson plans.
2. To help students organize their writing.
3. To help students conduct research.

Throughout this series, I will be using ConceptDraw MINDMAP from CS Odessa Inc. to create the mind maps used in these articles (The functionality I describe is standard in MINDMAP and in some other products).

A note on the history and development of mind mapping

The “Tree of Love” by Porphyry of Tyros
(3rd Century AD, Greece)

Some say that the practice of mind mapping is as old as the hills. It is, indeed, possible to find quite old examples of what is often referred to as “visual thinking”—the theory behind mind mapping. There has been much evidence to support the main tenet of visual thinking that the mixture of text and images promotes thinking and learning. Much of the rationale for this theory comes from Robert Sperry’s Nobel Prize-winning experiments with people whose two brain hemispheres had become separated.  Sperry’s experiments revealed some of the specialization of the brain, and how by stimulating more than one functional part of the brain, we increase the creative and memory capabilities of the brain.

From these origins grew the highly sophisticated practice known today as mind mapping. This manner of capturing, organizing, and sharing mixtures of information, ideas and images is today used by everyone from English and German school children to 85 of the Global Fortune 100 companies.

Images and observations of early life by
Leonardo da Vinci (15th Century AD, Italy)

Its use in academics has yet to be fully taken advantage of. One barrier continues to be the ability of students and teachers to have unfettered access to computers, computer software, and the Internet. For the purposes of this series, I will assume that you and your students access to all three.

Creating Multi-Media Lesson Plans
A common thread you will see in all of the uses I discuss is a teacher’s ability to combine multiple information type in a single, easily constructed and navigated document. A mind-mapped lesson plan often includes:

• A thesis statement and accompanying questions
• Active internet links
• Images and icons
• Answers and notes

Download a full example with step-by-step instructions and screen captures via Google Docs.

A Symphony of Meaning
“But what,” you might ask, “are the advantages or creating a lesson plan this way? It seems like it would be easier to do this as a word document?”

One of the results of Sperry’s research was that each hemisphere of the human brain is better suited to particular forms of information. Traditionally, the left hemisphere has been thought of as the home of reason, logic, numbers, and language. While the right side excels in rhythm, color, images, and intuition. Provide information is a way that appealed to as many of these cross strengths as possible, it was believed, and the brain would be more able to learn, remember, synthesize, and create.

As this idea has gained popularity over the years, so has the idea that some people’s brains are better able to take in information captured in one of these way (i.e. some of us are “visual learners.” More recently, research suggests that we all think better when information is communicated using these different modalities. Yes, a picture is worth a thousand words. But a picture with a caption written in bold red type with an exclamation point is worth a lot more.

Read the other entries in the series:
Part 2: The Chunking of Language
Part 3: Improving Student Writing
Part 4: Improving Research

Equations vs. Inequalities Mini-Poster Project

The first chapter in my first book is entitled "The Mini-Poster," so it should be no surprise that it's a favorite that I constantly adapt to new topics.  This time around, I wanted to do a "six weeks" project to wrap up the grading period in Algebra I, where we've been working on solving equations and inequalities.

In this project, students make four mini-posters (one 8.5" by 11" page each) for four (technically seven) types of problems:

1. One-step equations and inequalities
2. Two-step equations and inequalities
3. Multi-step equations and inequalities
4. Special case for inequalities (when you have to flip the inequality sign)

Except for the last one, each poster is supposed to have what is essentially the same problem worked out the same way, but one is an equation and the other an inequality (with the sign of their choosing).  The difference is that the inequality has the particular sign and needs to be graphed on the number line.

By forcing them to do the mirror-image problems, the message is explicit: you solve both problems with the same steps.  Along with reviewing all of the problems, the purpose of this project is indeed to draw the clear connection between solving the two types of problems.  I told students to keep the title and "how to solve" sections the same as what's on the directions, but to change the examples (helpfully outlined in boxes) to their own

Regular readers will probably note that this isn't all that different from the Linear Equation Formula Book project I shared last week; indeed, one student that I have in both classes made the same connection fairly quickly.  That's because it's not really all that different.  But that's okay.


Download a PDF of the project directions here:

Equations vs. Inequalities Mini-Poster Project

Here are some of my earlier mini-poster ideas for you to draw from:

• Project Idea: Independent vs. Dependent Variables - the original (I feel like this constitutes a "classic" at this point)
• 2 More Mini-Poster Ideas
• Project Idea: Linear Functions Mini-Poster

Singing About Domain and Range (Again)

Today I'm performing the Domain & Range Song for my math models students:



I'll let you know how it goes this time around with my kids, but feel free to show it (or perform it) for your own.  In the meantime, read the original post on how and why to use ideas like this in your classes.

Teaching Economics with Games and Activities

The field of Economics is at the cornerstone of our everyday existence. There is no aspect of our day to day functioning that it does not impact in some way, shape or form.

Whether we’re shopping at the local mall, dining out at a restaurant, toiling away at our jobs, or simply having our cars serviced, there’s no escaping its basic principles, practices and reach. That is exactly why today’s student benefits from understanding its relevance and how it defines and shapes the future.

Even though it’s a serious topic, class instruction doesn't have to be boring and strictly “by the book.” You’ll find that the class environment and experience will be much more enjoyable and enlightening through combining various teaching methods, including games and activities. Games and activities are great teaching tools to encourage interaction, comprehension and retention.

With this in mind, here are a few creative and fun ways to teach learners of varying ages and levels about economics.

1. Schoolhouse Rock Series - Have you heard of this clever product? For those that haven’t, Schoolhouse Rock was a series created by David McCall that made learning various subjects really cool and fun. Inspired back in the ’70s when his son was having difficulty remembering and mastering mathematical concepts, he came up with the idea of using rock music as a teaching tool, and produced a line of musical educational products that addressed an array of subjects---from math, to grammar, to the constitution, It originally aired as musical shorts on Saturdays, back in the ’70s on ABC, but all of the original videos are available on DVD. Its effectiveness existed in using key phrases, colorful language, alliteration and other devices to boost memory and to create lasting connections.

2. Monopoly Game - Monopoly is a board game originally created by Parker Bros that imparts important and useful concepts and vocabulary words for students of economics. Participants will use strategy to buy and sell property, learn about applicable taxes, and handle money transactions in the process. Hugely popular, the game is still enjoyed today by adults as well. Besides the fun factor, it’s a great way to incorporate aspects of monetary economics.

3. Add technology to your assignments. Online activities can also bring a new dimension to your efforts. There are many online resources that provide puzzles, worksheets, vocabulary lessons, and even interesting links to follow. How do you find them? Simply “Google” the key words in the search engine. For example, to find your subject, type in “economic games” and you’ll yield a listing of perhaps thousands of leads. The more specific your inquiry, the more successful the search. Try it.

4. Bring students current on current events. Bring a recent newspaper to class and find relevant headlines that can be discussed in the classroom. For example, President Obama’s job creation plan, or the rising price of gas. The want ads can be used to discuss career goals, entrepreneurship, and taxes. Sales ads can be the catalyst for a conversation of wants vs. needs. Get the picture?

Follow these four techniques and tools to make learning economics a fun and rewarding experience for your students. Also, keep in mind that we are living in a day and age (and video culture), where “entertainment value” is increasingly important, even in the classroom.

This is a guest post by Troy Edwards, who writes for the blog What is Economics? where you can learn about and study economics 101. He has been in education for 10 years as a teacher and administrator. Currently, Troy is a math and social studies teacher in a special settings school for disadvantaged students.

Using Comic Books & Graphic Novels in the Classroom

This is a guest post by elementary teacher and frequent contributor Adrian Neibauer. You can reach him on aneibauer@cherrycreekschools.org.

Photo courtesy: Enokson

WHY use comic books/graphic novels in the classroom?

The short answer: I teach by whatever means necessary…even comic books.

The long answer: I use comic books/graphic novels in my classroom because I intend to change the way teachers look at literacy instruction. I want to give teachers supplemental literacy instructional tools: comic books and graphic novels, in order to increase their male students’ level of intrinsic reading motivation. I want to prove to parents and educators that I can adequately teach students to use critical thinking skills and reading strategies with comic literature.

Here are some great resources for those just starting out:

• The Graphic Classroom
• The Twelve Best Comic Books for the Classroom
• No Flying No Tights - Graphic novel review website
• Free Online Comic Books
• Graphic Novel Reporter
• MAKE BELIEFS COMIX! - Online comic creator for kids.
• First Second Books 
• FREE COMIC BOOK DAY! It happens once a year, but you get free comics!

Most local comic book stores have $1.00 comics. It is probably the cheapest reading material I can find, and it is great for buying multiple copies for a guided reading table. Just be sure to read/preview any/all comics you purchase.

Graphic novels are a bit longer and more expensive, but they make some great ones for potential novel studies…especially if you want to read a classic and compare it to the graphic novel version.

SMART board USERS:
I created interactive SMART board lessons for each of the eight essential reading strategies I intended to teach: Inference, Questioning, Prediction, Summary, Connections, Visualizing, Determining Important Ideas, and Synthesis. I also included an introduction to reading comic literature so that every student enters each lesson with a basic schema regarding how to read a comic book/graphic novel. I intended for this curriculum to take about nine weeks to teach, with one week dedicated to each of the reading strategies and the introduction. However, I want to reiterate that this comic curriculum is only meant to supplement already best reading instructional practices taking place in the classroom; therefore, teachers can use these lessons as they see fit in their classroom.

• Comic Book Curriculum Chart [Google Doc]
• Comic Conventions [PDF]
• Comics and Reading Strategies [PDF]
• Comics and Reading Strategies [SMART Notebook]
• Comic Book Survey [PDF]
• Intro to Comics [SMART Notebook]

NON-SMART board USERS:
Throughout this process, I encountered some challenges. Each interactive SMART board lesson took considerable time to create. At times, I struggled with embedding various comic examples from my newly purchased books within each lesson. I do not own a scanner, so I relied on the Internet and my document camera to display the graphic novel example(s). There is a growing popularity in digital comic literature, but as with any new technology, it is not free. In the future, I plan to pursue this option.

Marvel's Digital Comics is a great resource for grades 4-5 or for anyone with a projector. You can view free samples of tons of great comics. NOTE: Always preview any literature, even comic literature, before showing it to students.

Marvel Kids is geared for the younger grades (K-3).

BOOK RESOURCES:
Adventures in Graphica by Terry Thompson is by far the BEST book of teachers wanting to get some comics and start teaching. Terry has amazing lessons that are ready to use for any classroom!

Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud. Great for anyone interesting in a more in-depth analysis of comic literature. It is written in comic format, which makes some of the heavier concepts easier to understand.

Basically, use what you have available. Teach student to read comics correctly, and then you can easily make the transition to regular text. DO NOT let anyone tell you that comics are easier reading than traditional literature. I own a copy of the graphic novel adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report. It is a DIFFICULT book!

Finally, present comics as just another medium for traditional genres. There are comic mysteries, memoirs, short stories, poetry, you name it. Don’t feel like you need to be an expert. Kids love learning/exploring new and uncharted territory together with you. Just have fun reading!

A Micro-reminder About Using Microcredit in the Classroom

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email update from Kiva letting me know that I had enough money in my account to reloan it ($25).  I chose to contribute to a young man named Robert who's trying to make his own way in Uganda.  For about $75, I've helped fund 9 projects in 8 different countries over the last 2 years.  It never ceases to amaze me how far a dollar can go in developing countries.

To follow up on my 2009 article 3 Ways to Use Microcredit to Invest Your Students, I'm bringing this topic up again as a possible end-of-year project for your classroom.  The last month or two of school is difficult to trudge through, and this kind of outside-the-box project can grab your students' attention and provides an opportunity to connect to the real world in a tangible way.

It can work in just about any subject or grade level: In a social studies course, your students could analyze the economy of the host country.  In ELA, you could use the description of the person or group you're loaning to as a springboard to creative writing about their life.  In math, start with finding the conversion rates for money and take off from their.  In short, use it as you would any thematic unit.

Plus, updates from the project might not come until after the school year has ended, giving your students an excuse to visit you next year!

Kiva also just announced a "Green Loans" program, so if your kids are interested in environmental projects (and so many are these days), it's just another reason to try it out.

Have you experimented with Kiva in your classroom or with your kids at home?  Share your experiences in the comments.

Pop Culture Connections Are Easy to Make, But They Don't Last Forever

A few years ago I shared a lesson I created on probability based around the TV game show "Deal or No Deal."  I'm humbled that to this day, teachers seek out, use the lesson and comment on the post about what a great idea it was.  I do think it was one of my better ideas, but it's also one that needs to die: the show was cancelled over a year ago.  It's no longer relevant to your students, or anyone else.

That doesn't mean we shouldn't continue to look for opportunities to use bits of pop culture and mass media to make connections or simply liven up what's going on in class.  A funny writing prompt about "Jersey Shore" is great now, but in two years, there should be no trace of Snooki in your lesson (just like there will be no trace of her in the media any more).  Similarly, a review game based on "Survivor" no longer has a place in any classroom; that show is a distant memory in the public consciousness, and has been for some time.

If you were going to have students create a social media profile for the characters in 'A Midsummer Night's Dream," which platform would you use: Friendster, MySpace, or Facebook?* 

Still, there are some enduring pieces of pop culture that you can safely use over the long haul.  The Super Bowl, the Oscars and March Madness come to mind immeadiately.  However, you should still be tweaking and improving your lesson that uses them every year--just as you should do with everything else in your repetoire.

Wondering how to get up on the latest item of fascination amongst your students?  Ask them. Listen to them.  There's no better source, offline or online, that will give you better intel.

*Correct answer: Twitter.

Flash Games Enter the Classroom

This is a guest post by Lindsey Wright, a content creator for OnlineSchools.org.

In these increasingly ADD and ADHD-beset times teachers are becoming more and more hard-pressed to find ways to get children to effectively absorb knowledge. Card games, board games and puzzle games have been a growing part of classroom education for the last few decades, but as attention spans get ever shorter, more drastic measures will need to be incorporated. Using newer technologies, such as Adobe Flash, a multimedia platform used to make Web sites more animated and interactive, will likely buy instructors time and engage children more thoroughly. However, the question of whether the benefits outweigh the detriments has yet to be answered.

The number of flash-based classroom resources, while by no means extensive, is slowly on the rise. Searching the Internet for educational flash games can bring up some resources that teachers can supplement with user-created content from sites that allow them to create personalized educational games and integrate them into their curricula. Fortunately, with create-your-own resources like these, teachers are not reliant merely upon existing games: they are able to customize the material so that students get the most benefit from playing.

These games are often relatively simple puzzles that illustrate, with bright colors and an easy interface, the concepts explained in lectures or in textbooks. Supplementing these more traditional materials with flash games can net wonderful benefits, because students can see an immediate and direct correlation between question and answer. When students are able to see whether the choices they make are correct or incorrect, they begin to develop an understanding of how the concept works as a whole.

More traditional classroom learning teaches concepts to students passively, via lecture. Aside from one or two diagnostic quizzes in which answers are marked with no explanation, students are left to fend for themselves until testing time, when it is often too late to foster true understanding. Games can fill in this missing "hands-on" component of the learning process.

Another benefit of flash games is they are able to engage children. Although it pains teachers to think it, today’s children (who have been inundated with flashy and colorful technology from their infancy) have increasingly short attention spans. This means that many children no longer have the patience to sit with a textbook and absorb its contents. While this state of affairs is not desirable in the long run, a short-term perspective acknowledges that a teacher must do whatever he or she can do to foster maximum absorption of material. Games, with their engaging interface and interactive play, seem to be a key to do just that.

Despite their attractiveness, using flash games in classroom learning is not the most ideal solution. Their use is designed to help students absorb concepts, but usually in the most simplistic way. Sophisticated thinking and understanding of more complex concepts will be lost if teachers rely heavily upon games. In another sense, using these games seems to be admitting defeat in the battle against the simplification of knowledge, i.e. catering to shorter attention spans and a more surface understanding rather than fighting against them. A strong and engaging teacher can infuse a passion for the subject into all but the most reluctant students, thus negating the need for games.

Ultimately, while there are negatives to the implementation of flash games into classroom curricula, these negatives are countered by many positives. The customizability of the games, the interactivity of gameplay versus a passive lecture mode and the engaging nature of games all provide strong support for the continued use of flash games in classroom settings. These benefits must be considered against the fact that games often foster a more surface understanding and a shorter attention span in students that may already be prone to these behaviors. All in all, flash games are a powerful and interesting tool that, in the future, will only be more fully developed. With greater customization comes the potential for more complex gameplay, which will only help in the quest to turn flash games into effective tools.

The Domain and Range Song World Premiere! [Video]

Season 2, Episode 1:


Here are the lyrics to the song:

THE DOMAIN AND RANGE SONG
To the tune of “Irreplaceable” by Beyonce

To the right, to the right
To the right, to the right
Everything in the domain from the left to the right

On the graph, domain’s the x
From least to greatest, and here's what's next
I'm talking about the range--that's the y
how far up and down the graph goes at the same time
Put those in order from least to greatest too
So you can answer the questions that I gave you

Sitting in Mr. D's class, thinking bout how he's such a fool,
How we'll never ever forget how to do
domain and range yeah

You must now know domain, you must now know the range
I can help you understand in a minute
Matter fact, you’ll pass the test in a minute, baby

You must now know domain, you must now know the range
I can help you understand for tomorrow
So don’t you ever for a second ever forget, domain and range!

So when you have a coordinate point
A pair of (x, y), just remember this
Baby the first number’s the domain,
The second number’s the range
Cause the truth of the matter is… domain and range are so is easy!

[Chorus]

Read about how I originally used this in class in Teaching Domain and Range (with a little help from Beyonce), and then read even more about it from my 2008 book, Ten Cheap Lessons: Easy, Engaging Ideas for Every Secondary Classroom.

Mr. D TV is my weekly teacher advice video series.  I cover just about any topic related to education and teaching.  If you have a question you'd like me to answer, email me (teachforever@gmail.com). If you like the video, check out last season's finale and my YouTube channel for more.