Longlining in the Alaskan Gulf

During my Alaska studies class, a component of the MAT program, I produced this video in Windows Movie Maker about longlining for halibut and black cod in southeast Alaska.

My husband is a commercial fisherman and one of my aims for this project was to become more familiar with the stages involved in the process of longlining.

Embarking on a similar project would be a challenging and rewarding task for my students, and I intend to use this production as a model for future, locally-based projects in my classroom.

View my video

Online Community

Highlights
This history teacher's website from the UK contains many useful links and resources for teaching history in the classroom, including many downloadable PowerPoint's and interactive games. I appreciate hearing multiple European perspective on education and teaching methods in order to examine differences and similarities between teaching in the US and in the UK.

Interesting forums such as the following one on teaching local history are updated regularly by teachers who provide useful links to helpful websites and recommendations for contributors and followers.

I have ordered a book that was recommended by seasoned teachers contributing to a forum designed for new teachers with queries about the profession. The book is called 'The Teacher's Toolkit" by Paul Ginnis and supposedly contains a variety of strategies that revitalize learning.

This informative article about differentiation is followed by a series of questions and answers and a discussion forum, all of which I found useful and applicable.

Drawbacks

• Many articles and contributions on the site are specific to the British educational system and standardized tests that are not relevant to a US teacher.


• The majority of the contributors are British, or Canadian or American teachers working in Britain and therefore much of the site is dedicated to the particulars of British schools.

Savoonga: i-movie project

Overview
As a language Arts teacher, I recognize the benefit of using digital storytelling to motive visual learners, illustrate concepts, convey personal experiences and to make visual connections that ground real-life events in effective images.

I have been determined to familiarize myself with Mac in order to create an i-movie ever since I did a unit on Irish culture in Language Arts that culminated in an i-movie project. I was hindered, to a large extent, in helping students who struggled with technological difficulties due to my lack of exposure to Macs. I found the experience quite frustrating, as did my students, whom I referred to their peers for tech support. Due to the nature of the project and the limited time-frame, many students were more than reluctant to help their struggling peers. They experienced many technological frustrations, many of which could have been easily reconcilable had I been more apt at troubleshooting technical problems related to i-movie.

I have become accustomed to using a PC to create videos in windows movie maker, but I am determined to familiarize myself with a Mac so that I can challenge myself to complete this valuable project. Our teaching team is about to embark on an i-movie project with our advisory groups to help students reflect about their personal experiences in school this year. I hope to ensure that my previous lack of competency with i-movie is rectified through this project.

Goals:

• Familiarize myself with a specific Mac application: i-movie.
• Utilize i-movie as a means to make a culturally aware production about Alaska Native subsistence and adaptation in order to provide a model for my students.
• Raise my expectations for student productions by improving my own video-making skills.
  

Frustrations and reflections:

• Automatic Ken Burn's effect is applied to each slide, thus cutting horizontal slides, and creating unnecessary delays in production.
• End titles in i-movie run so fast that they are unreadable (not a frustration I encountered with i-movie).
• I faltered at many points in the narration, and was unsure how to splice the sound recording to delete unnecessary pauses or mistakes.
• Uploading such a huge file is proving problematic due to mega bite restrictions on certain sites.
• Overall, I'm impressed by my improvement over the course of the project, and certainly feel more adept and competent in producing an i-movie or teaching and assisting my students with their productions.

Future modifications and areas for self-improvement:

• Specify a mega bite limit for my students in the future to enable them to publish their productions on sites such as u-tube.
• Make a detailed rubric that specifies a minimum and maximum time-length.
• Produce a specific model for students before they embark on their own projects as a gauge of expectations.
• Do a series of mini-lessons before, during and post production, with the assumtions that many students are unfamiliar with the application. (Surprisingly, I found that many of them are)
• Garage band and mastering podcasts will be my next self-improvement projects.
• Familiarize myself with Pages.

View my i-movie.

Assistive Technologies for Reading

by Ted S. Hasselbring and Margaret E. Bausch

Article Assessment

Overview
Assistive technologies are described by the writers as a "lifeline" to students who have learning disabilities and struggle to read and understand grade-level material. Measures adopted in Kentucky schools to provide assistive technologies for students with learning disabilities are commended in the article. 95 percent of Kentucky's public schools have a site license for Read & Write Gold software that provides students with customized reading and writing support. Support such as text-to-speech features and word prediction "dramatically speed up the student's composition process." Teachers have found that "students with disabilities are far more likely to reread text passages several times for clarity" when using the software than when listening to a teacher read the same text aloud.

Read on.

The Overdominance of Computers

by Lowell Monke

Overview
Monke is concerned that computers have begun to dominate, rather than revolutionize, education. He warns educators that preparing children to wisely use technological tools does not necessitate early experimentation with these tools: "preparation does not necessarily warrant early participation." The writer of the article sees the importance of strengthening young peoples' inner resources such as "self-discipline, moral judgment and empathy" before allowing them to use potentially harmful technologies.

Read on

My Digital Story

Literature is relevant because it resonates with our own lives. While reading Of Mice and Men in our language arts class I was reminded of my love for animals as a child and a paradoxical event from my childhood that parallels events in the novella. I narrate an internal and external personal conflict in my digital story.

I hope that my students personalize the literature they read by making personal connections with characters, themes, struggles and conflicts that they encounter. Creating this digital story was a means for me to make this essential connection explicit and to model digital storytelling for my students.

Here is the story map I created as a model and the rubric I designed so that my students can complete a similar project, and peer and self-evaluate their work.

Useful Internet Resources

Web English Teacher is a site that I find particularly helpful. I appreciate the wide variety of links it provides for themes, novels and literature commonly studied in high school.

There is a short description of what each site contains under each resource, which saves time while scrolling through a list of potential lesson plan material. The resources for professional development for teachers are aslo particularly helpful.

This guide for grammar and writing is very useful for activities at various stages of the writing process with great examples of student work.

This section of Discovery Education contains an interactive site map that provides various easily accessible and useful categories. A link on the site provides access to a variety of rubrics from many sources.