The Best School Fundraiser

Back in August, I had the pleasure to interview CEO and co-founder of Storybird.com, Mark Ury, on my podcast, The Tightwad Teacher. Storybird is a great site that fosters creative student writing, and I have enjoyed great success when using it in class (click here for my tutorial on the site... click here or here to see some student work). During the conversation, Mr. Ury mentioned that the site had recently opened up a fundraising option. I was intrigued and decided almost immediately that I would make a Storybird fundraiser a priority going in to the 2011-12 school year.

Fundraising with Storybird is simple. First, students create their books. Next, the teacher sets a start and end date for a fundraiser. Finally, when the fundraiser expires, proceeds are automatically transferred to the teacher's PayPal account and books are sent to the school for distribution. It really is that simple.

Students have the option to purchase soft or hard cover copies of their work and the cost ranges from $14 - $30 depending on the length of the book. For each order placed, the classroom receives $5. Compared to the thin margins of profit that come from traditional school fundraisers, this is a great deal. What's even more important is that students are selling something that is meaningful to them and also meaningful to the family members who are purchasing copies. It helps generate funds for the classroom and it gives students the opportunity to feel the thrill of seeing their names printed on a professionally published book.

Earlier this week, my students' books arrived. Simply put, they are proud as hell of their work. With the Storybird fundraiser, we were able to raise $180. We'll be using this money to help fund a lending project from a third world country - more about that here.

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5 Awesome Things You Can Do With an IPad and an LCD Projector

I've always wanted a document camera in my classroom, so yesterday I made my own - using my iPad. Here's a quick rundown of how to do this:

• Purchase a VGA Adapter Cable. You can pick one up online for around 20 bucks.
• Create your iPad stand. For mine, I borrowed a ring stand from the science department and clamped it to a clipboard. It was sturdy and could safely accommodate the weight of my iPad.
  
• Use a VGA cable to connect the adapter to the projector. You now have a fully functioning document camera!

Why might someone want to do this, you ask? I've only been experimenting with mine for two days, and I've already stumbled on five mind-blowing uses.

1. Use it as a document camera
Once the iPad is connected to the projector and "mounted" onto the ring stand, the most basic use of this set up is as a document camera. Simply open the camera app and you're ready to go. As an English teacher, this is a natural fit in my classroom. Today, for example, while students worked on rough drafts essays on examples of irony in O. Henry's The Ransom of Red Chief, I circulated the room and occasionally scooped up a paper and slid it under the iPad. It projected nicely onto the screen and I was then able to use these student papers to give suggestions as well as to have the group peer edit. It was far more efficient that having students line up at my desk to individually edit with me.

2. Record demonstrations
Switch the camera app to video mode, hit record, and you now have a work area capable of recording demonstrations and voice narration. This is an effortless way for teachers to kill two birds with one stone- while providing instruction in class, they are simultaneously creating a video "study guide" that can be posted on the class website or blog for students to review.

3. Real-time Kahn Academy
If you're not familiar with the wildly popular Khan Academy videos, click here to see what you've been missing. If you're already aware of the instructional potential behind the Flipped Classroom concept, then give it a try using your iPad. Similar to recording demonstrations, apps like Show Me and ScreenChomp allow the user to create a video that captures finger strokes as well as voice narration. Again, these videos can be recorded live in class and then used later as asynchronous review for students.

4. Hands-on mind mapping
I've always considered mind mapping to be a natural fit for tablet devices because brainstorming tends to work best when ideas can be easily manipulated, moved, and reorganized. Apps like Popplet and MindMash are great for doing just that, and the addition of a projector makes it possible for mind mapping on the iPad to become a group process rather than an individual or small group task.

5. Annotating Student Work
Let's take a closer look at using the iPad as a document camera. In addition to simply viewing student work, the iPad can also very easily snap pictures. From there, teachers can quickly load that image into an app like Doodle Buddy or Show Me to create an environment where the work can be easily annotated, highlighted, or otherwise marked up by either the teacher or other participating students.

I'm sure I'm missing all kind of fantastic ideas. What are your thoughts?

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5 Tools for Online Collaboration

Yesterday I presented at Niagara's Exploration of Technology in Teaching conference on tools for online collaboration. Social media tools like Facebook and Twitter are either ignored or banned completely in education, so I thought this was a valuable topic to share with the 150 or so teachers in attendance. Our students are always-on creatures who do most of their communicating - and therefore collaboration as well - in an environment that most schools don't even consider.

Typically when thinking about online collaboration, two things come to mind - wikis and Google Docs. Both of these are fantastic resources for teachers, but my suspicion was that most of the teachers at the conference either already knew what these tools were, or at the very least knew how to independently find information on their uses. Instead, I chose to highlight 5 lesser-known tools that could be used for collaboration in the classroom. Below is a quick summary for each as well as the SlideRocket presentation I used at the conference.

Tool #1 - Edmodo

I wrote at the beginning of summer about how impressed I was with Edmodo, and the shine has yet to tarnish. Students find the Facebook-esque layout to be intuitive and teacher will find that Edmodo makes it surprisingly easy to manage multiple conversations with students online. Social networks are the epitome of online communication and collaboration, and Edmodo is an excellent and safe way to incorporate them in the classroom.

Tool #2 - BoostCam

BoostCam is a great alternative to video conferencing products such as Skype and Oovoo. While it is certainly more primitive, teachers will find appeal in the fact that it doesn't require registration or any software downloads. If you're looking to create fast, single-serving video connections, BoostCam is a great option.

Tool #3 - Etherpad

Etherpad is a synchronous collaborative workspace similar to Google Docs. In 2009, Google purchased the site and immediately shut it down (were they afraid of a little competition?). Fortunately, they also released the source code. There are now many derivative sites based on this code, all of which are excellent resources (iEtherpad, PrimaryPad, TypeWith.Me, for example) for teachers looking for ways of getting students to write collaboratively in an online environment.

Tool #4 - Crocodoc

Admittedly, this tool was just recently shared with me by one of my graduate students, but it's a wonderful resource for teachers looking to get quality editing out of students. Crocodoc basically creates a layer to any document uploaded to the site. There, students can mark up and annotate on the layer. This provides feedback to the author without giving the peer who is editing the ability to physically change the writing.

Tool #5 - WallWisher

There are other sites that create an online "bulletin board," but to my knowledge WallWisher was one of the first, so I felt it was notable enough to add to the list. Basically, it's an online wall where students can collaboratively post and arrange sticky notes. During my presentation at NETT, one teacher also suggested that it could be used for classification activities - the teacher populates the wall with notes, and then students have to rearrange them. A clever use for this tool!

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Do Typewriters Produce Better Writing Than Computers?

About a year ago, I found a used 1960s portable typewriter for sale. I thought it would be an interesting novelty to share with my students, so I purchased it and brought it in to my classroom. I figured it may peak some interest, but my students’ responses were truly memorable. Several simply had no idea what a typewriter even was; nearly all admitted to never having used one. This was evident when I began to let them experiment on the machine. There were baffled by the missing ability to delete and correct mistakes. One student even apologized after the carriage return bell sounded. He thought he had broken the typewriter!

I was a bit intrigued by the dinosaur as well; I am 29 years old, so other than pounding on my mother’s electric typewriter as a kid, I had no experience with this medium. As a novelty, I decided to write a few blog posts on the typewriter (I later learned this was a niche form of blogging called typecasting). I found that my writing and thought process changed considerably – I was more cautious about syntax and word choice because I was unable to go back and edit, and the length of time it took to write each passage increased simply because my finger dexterity forced me to take my time and firmly strike each key. In the end, my efforts produced a well-thought piece of writing.

I began to wonder how typewriters would affect my students’ writing. After all, a common complaint by teachers is that students rush through writing assignments and are usually hasty when it comes to planning quality responses. I wondered if my district could learn something about teaching the writing process from these archaic machines.

For the past year, I have been slowly accumulating typewriters from community members and friends so that I can use them with my students. I have almost 20 manual typewriters dating from the 1930s to the early 1980s.

This Spring I am planning a writing project to determine the affects of manual typewriters on demand writing tasks. Judging by my own experiences, I predict that the quality and depth of the responses will be better for students who type using a manual typewriter rather than a laptop.

By no means am I suggesting schools abandon computers for typewriters; rather I feel that a lot can be learned by examining how students write using these devices. As more schools move toward a 1:1 environment, this information will become invaluable.

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Using ZooBurst in the Classroom

It seems like at the start of each school year, there's one new web app that I cannot wait to try with my students. In past years it was Glogster, or Storybird. This year, it's ZooBurst.

ZooBurst creates interactive, 3D pop-up books. In addition to this, it can also be viewed in Augmented Reality mode with the help of a webcam. After printed a special paper from the ZooBurst site, the webcam captures you and "projects" your pop-up book onto the paper you are holding. While this technology is fledgling and not without its major flaws, it is still quite fun to play with, and really lends nicely to the concept of a 3D pop-up book.

Holding my "book" in Augmented Reality

Here is a ZooBurst I made for my team's webpage. I thought this was a much nicer way to provide contact information for parents. The book can be rotated and viewed from different angles by holding down the left mouse button. Clicking on the exclamation points displays the contact info.

I made a tutorial my students when it comes time for them to start their own ZooBursts. Feel free to download and use it in your own classroom!

ZooBurst Tutorial

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All Typewriters are not Created Equal

Below is the 2nd of my series of posts exploring the use of old manual typewriters. Read the first post, here.

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Using Typewriters in the Classroom

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The Great American Mail Race

Last week I received a letter from Tami, a 14-year-old student from Butte Valley Middle School in Dorris, California. The letter was simply addressed to “Any 8th Grade English Teacher” and began by explaining that her class was participating in The Great American Mail Race.

After reading her letter and the accompanying note from her teacher, I wanted to learn more about this project. I was surprised to find an absence of an official website, but Google helped uncover the basic premise of the Mail Race. Students from around the country use the computer to find the address of a faraway school and then write to them sharing information about their personal interests, and their school and community. The class who receives this letter is encouraged to respond to it, and then find a new school to write to. The Great American Mail Race is like an educational version of a chain letter.

The problem with correspondence sites like e-Pals and services such as Skype is that the difficulty is in finding someone willing to participate. I love the idea that the Mail Race removes this barrier.

I’m planning on having my students participate in The Great American Mail Race. I’m going to randomly assign the state, but each student will be able to choose two different schools to write to. I figure this will double the odds of receiving a return letter. As a team, we’ll be mailing out over 200 letters – I’m interested to see the number of replies we get in return.

Guidelines for this project appear to be flexible and not really documented on any particular site. Some schools have students write friendly letters, others mail out formal surveys. It’s usually encouraged that the teacher mail a letter along with the student’s to help explain the project, but even this seems to be optional.

If you’re interested in participating in The Great American Mail Race, feel free to use my handouts as a model for how to approach it with students, and also how to formulate your own teacher letter.

The Great American Mail Race - Teacher Letter




The Great American Mail Race - Student Directions

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Student Examples - Storybird.com (Part II)

Yesterday I posted the first round of finished student stories using Storybird.com, and I figure it's only fair to give all the projects equal exposure. Here are the rest of them.

Students were more than thrilled to see comments on their work. If you find yourself looking to kill some time while waiting for that Thanksgiving turkey to thaw, perhaps you could leave some feedback for my kiddos. It would be greatly appreciated, and a chance for students to see what publishing for a real world audience is all about!


Was It Better Not To Know ? on Storybird

Monster In The Closet on Storybird

The Life of Destinino on Storybird

Charlie On The Moon on Storybird

The Mighty Jungle on Storybird

The Lonely Girl on Storybird

The Yeti on Storybird

Bad Luck on Storybird

The First Rabbit on the Moon on Storybird

The Orange Chair on Storybird

Who Stole My Cheese? on Storybird

Imagination Gone Wild!!! on Storybird

I Wish I was a Bunny on Storybird

There Is No Such Thing As Monsters! on Storybird

Where's Santa? on Storybird

Birthday Truth on Storybird

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Student Examples - Storybird.com

My students have been hard at work creating stories on Storybird.com that answer the essential question, "Is it better not to know?" I wrote about the project in a previous blog post, so I thought I would share their finished work. If you have a few minutes, please read them and feel free to comment on their stories. What a great experience it would be for them to come to class in the morning and see their stories have been read by a worldwide audience! (To add comments, click on the title of the story located under the embedded file.)


The girl who wished to be a mermaid on Storybird

The Tower on Storybird

The Disappearance on Storybird

Glenn's Adventure on Storybird

THE WOODS on Storybird

The Story Teller on Storybird

Lost Fish on Storybird

The Flutist on Storybird

The Fox and The Pig on Storybird

The Mystical Gorilla and the Monkey on Storybird

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Using Postcards to Connect Students to the World

When I was in 7th grade, my French teacher connected us with pen pals in France. They wrote to us in English, and we responded in French. I remember being most interested in the small details of the letters – how the margins on their lined paper were slightly larger than ours, the curious stamps, and the red-bordered airmail envelopes they were sent in. It amazed me that I was holding something that had traveled thousands of miles. Once, our teacher (at the certain disapproval of our school who had to front the international charges) placed a call to our corresponding class. The idea that the voices on the other end of the speaker phone lived in a foreign land was enough to make all of our young minds explode.

Of course, this was in the early 90s, when the Internet was only for folks wealthy enough to afford AOL's hourly rate service. Other than the occasional Canuck (my hometown is located about 30 minutes from the Canadian border), most of us had never met anyone from another country.

That's something kids seem to take for granted today. It's nothing eyebrow-raising to compete against a German on Xbox live, or to have a conversation on a message board with someone living in Japan, or perhaps read the blog of a person experiencing the turmoil of the Middle East first-hand. Our ability to easily connect to anyone in the world has dulled the excitement in doing so. International connectivity is just a free Skype call away.

There's something missing in all of that. Something tangible – that feeling of wonder I got years ago from holding a paper that had seen more of the world than I had. I wanted to share that feeling with my students, and that's why I decided to turn Postcrossing into our year-long team project.

Postcrossing.com is a free service that allows random users to send each other postcards. For every postcard you send out, one is sent back to you from a different user. It's not correspondence, but more like single serving pen pals. The idea of having an anonymous and captive audience for my students to write to was an idea too good not to try.

Rather than use generic postcards, we had this one printed for our Postcrossing project. It was only about 70 bucks for 500 cards, well worth it in my opinion. Every week I pick one student per class – five total – to write a postcard representing the team. They write about their likes and dislikes, about their homes and families. That postcard is a chance to share a piece of their lives with someone they will never meet.

I don't grade these. It's about the experience, not the evaluation. When we receive postcards, they are shared with the team and then added to our Postcrossing map along with a string indicating its point of origin. And much like myself in 7th grade, my students are fascinated by minutia like the curious images on the postcards, interesting spelling, or unique first names. All things they wouldn't think twice about in an online environment.

At the time of this post, our Postcrossing account indicated that the postcards currently hanging in my room have traveled a combined distance of more than 120,000 miles. Even though that's a number so large most of my kids simply can't fathom it, these postcards connect them to the rest of the world better than any website, chat room, or email could ever accomplish.

A brief article on Postcrossing in The Niagara Gazette

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Using Storybird.com in the classroom

Do you remember that scene in Forest Gump where Lieutenant Dan appears on the dock as Gump sails his shrimping boat through the bay? Forest is so overcome by the excitement of seeing his old war buddy that he jumps overboard to swim to shore, leaving his boat to become a temporary analog of the famous Flying Dutchman ghost ship.

That’s usually how I react to new bits of technology. I don’t look back or anticipate potential problems – I blindly jump in. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

I haven’t decided if using Storybird with my students is going to be a success, or one of my ideas that are prone to devastating failure. Storybird is a free service where users can create (collaboratively, if desired) their own stories using a collection of illustrations provided by the site.

Here’s my idea: We are finishing up a reading of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon. The big question that keeps resurfacing throughout the unit is Is is better not to know? The kids seem to understand its meaning in the context of Charlie Gordon, but they’re having a hard time connecting it to their own lives.

I got to thinking – wouldn’t it be cool if they had to write a story that focused on that same essential question? Beginning next week students will begin working on writing a brief tale – a children’s story, perhaps – that centers around a character discovering something he/she perhaps would have been better off not knowing.

The project will get a bit trickier when they realize that Storybird does not allow a user to upload their own images. Students will have to choose a set of illustrations and fashion their story around the images available.

Having two variables – a required theme and a specific set of illustrations – may be too much for them. But I’ve already jumped off the dock with this one, so all there’s left to do is see who sinks and who swims.

Below is a sample story Songbird created to explain their vision as well as the handout I’m planning on using with students to explain how to use the site.


About us: a peek inside Storybird on Storybird


How to Use Storybird.com

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Why I Blog

I was reading MsJWeir's first post in her newly created blog, and it got me thinking about my own experiences (follow her on Twitter @msjweir).

In education, blogging is the best of all worlds. It provides a universal audience, feedback, revision, purpose – it's like the perfect writing assignment. I am always on the hunt for the latest and greatest technological something-or-other that I can use in my class, and blogs certainly fall into that category. But that's not the only reason why I keep a blog.

I think one goal of English Language Arts is to create independent readers and writers. Wouldn't it be hypocritical for me to request this of my students if I don't practice what I preach? My students don't know the address to my blog but they know it exists, and they know I try to post often.

It's the same reason I try to read my own book while my students read theirs during SSR (silent sustained reading). Teachers spend too much time telling kids that reading and writing is important, when we should be telling them it's valuable.

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How to Use Glogster in the Classroom

One of the first sites I nosed out on Twitter was glogster.com/edu from @pamillamc and @rcurrin. According to the site, Glogster is: A web 2.0 platform that easily allows users to upload photos, videos, text, audio and more to create a unique online, interactive poster. To see its true potential, I decided to give it a go with my group of about 80 7th grade students.

Here's the how-to I used with my kids. The project concludes tomorrow - I'll post some student samples as well as a full review.

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Essays & Theses School Work project worksheet

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Student Example of Persuasive Writing

I have to give my kids credit. For seventh grade, this is focused and articulate writing. Here is the girls' letter to me, and my response.

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