Welcome to Mrs. Brucker's class!

Join us in our journey as we chronicle our hits and misses in technology integration! We are embarking on a technology adventure as a 21st Century Classroom, thanks to a donation from Phillips 66 Refinery, grants from the Education Foundation for Billings Public Schools, Q2 News and First Interstate Bank (One Class at a Time), and the Assessment Department for Billings Public Schools.

About our project:

http://bruckerbears4-5.blogspot.com/

If you were to visit my classroom blog, you would see a flurry of lexical activity. Videos, student-narrated stories, electronically published artwork, digital images, photographs, slideshows, and links to interactive games and lessons are peppered among 180 uniquely crafted posts. In fact, you would see the same things if you were to visit my classroom. A whole palette of digital opportunity colors the curriculum, and the main focus of these activities centers around words.

Several years ago, I was fortunate to attend a workshop by Dr. Kevin Feldman, vocabulary guru and co-author of the Read 180 program.  He was invited to Billings to emphasize the need for targeted vocabulary instruction and active student involvement.  He pointed out that there are a number of more complex words that occur with unusual frequency in the English language; these are words Dr. Feldman refers to as “mortar words.” To someday become successful adults and employees, students need to be able to conduct academic discussions, as well as write productively and academically. Since the academic lexicon is not a natural language for most students, it must be explicitly taught. Simply assigning worksheets does not do the job; instead, students need carefully calibrated instruction to move from using vernacular (plain ol’, everyday words) to academic language. After realizing that my students need to be exposed to higher-level vocabulary on a daily basis, I developed a Word of the Day program, in which students are actively engaged in and focused intensely on a target word each day (Dr. Feldman even had it published online on http://dyslexia.wordpress.com/tag/teaching-vocabulary/).

Word of the Day Journal

Our philological adventure begins each day with a journal entry. My students have a paper journal in which they record critical information about the word. Once students have rated their initial impression of the word, the pursuit begins to make this word ours.  This journal is projected onto a large screen with a document camera and a projector, then as a class, we interactively complete the lesson on that word using our classroom blog. Each blog post is exclusively dedicated to a “mortar word.” Entries include the same components as the journals, but also feature some type of image, video, game, activity, or other resource to further demonstrate or develop the use or meaning of the word.

Digital Slideshow

The purpose of these digital additions is to help students to see the word "in action." As these components are displayed on the screen, we connect them to background knowledge by taking turns using the word in our own contexts, and then students use this new knowledge to complete the response section of their journals.  Each day, I also assign a writing prompt that requires them to use the target word in a context that is meaningful to them, so students go onto the blog and write by posting a comment to that day's word.  Then, each time the word is heard or said from that point on, we acknowledge and celebrate its use with a round of applause. If a student sees, hears, or uses the words outside of the school day, he or she can (and does!) access the blog from home and describe how it was used.  Once this process is complete, the words become ours - we even have a revolving photo album on the blog that documents the students finding our words in books, magazines, posters, movies, television, signs, flyers…

The final addition to each day’s blog post is a multimedia pronunciation guide, hosted by SoundCloud. A student’s image is selected and uploaded to accompany his voice as he reads the word aloud. This component serves as an audio-visual reference for absent students, blog guests, and those who just need a reminder. We use an iPad2 to record, photograph, and upload this feature, then students are able to use our two classroom iPads (1^st generation) to interact with this and the other blog content.

Flip for Philology

Another key component to this project is student-produced videos, starring the Words of the Day. I choose two students from my class per week to make a video that will teach an upcoming word. Over the course of the year, we receive various forms of educational “enlightenment,” including skits, reenactments, interviews, newscasts, music videos, and spoofs. Students and their families cleverly craft their own meaningful ways to represent their words. On the day their videos are set to debut, students are not only responsible for showing their films, but they are also in charge of teaching the word, its history, examples, non-examples, synonyms, antonyms, and all of the of the other details that would make their word part of our lingo.

This addition to the Word of the Day project has had an enormously positive impact on my students. First, they verily “adopt” their words. With this instant ownership, they feel empowered to use their new words, and so high-level vocabulary becomes ubiquitous (yes, this was one of our words) in their speaking and writing. Second, the videos directly involve the families in researching, learning, using, and portraying a new word together. This has proven to be a fun and interesting way to engage the parents and get them more involved with our class and with their kids. In the spring, we celebrate each these cinematic creations with a Vocademy Awards Ceremony – a red carpet event held in our school’s Center for the Performing Arts (that’s the gym, to the non-philologists).

In order to take this project to the next level, I would like to add an assessment piece, in which I could collect data that shows students have learned and are retaining information about these words, what they mean, and how they are related to other words. Beginning with the initial rating system, I would like to make use of a classroom response system to log students’ initial understanding of words, as we do in their journals. Students rate the word on a 1-5 scale, first in their own journals, then with a public “vote” before launching into the teaching of the word, a process which takes about 30 minutes. We reassess the rating on the same word the next day, and with a simple raise of hands, I can get a snapshot of whether or not students sufficiently learned the word. If there are students whose secondary rating is below a 4 (relatively strong understanding), I have the higher-rating students reteach the word and give examples. Ideally, I would like to have hard data on this, so that I could then spiral back in a week, or even a month, to assess the mental permanence of those older words.  I also foresee using these tools to create authentic assessments; for example, I could take several words from the past month, and write multiple-choice sentences with the word correctly (and incorrectly) used in context to see if students can still identify the appropriate usage of the word. This could be tied to a grade for language arts, or simply used to determine the need for re-teaching. Obviously this type of classroom response system has a plethora of other uses; I could use these throughout my entire curriculum on a daily bases. This particular technology is one about which I have been dreaming for a long time!

I am very excited about the prospect of the New Classroom. I am intrigued by the possibility of having my classroom serve as a technology “fishbowl” for the sake of educating our community. I am comfortable with observers, and am equally at ease acting in a mentorship position. I have had many opportunities to act as a mentor through TILT, but that leadership has even stretched beyond the boundaries of my classroom. I have experience in seeking out and “Skyping” or “Oovooing” virtual guests, such as Jeff the Nature Guy, as well as in managing my class through a videoconference, as Tammie Erickson and I did in a TinyChat with a fourth-grade class from Canada, or as I did when my class was invited to participate in a Google Chat for a Salute to Education luncheon. I have had several people visit my room to learn how to effectively integrate technology. One guest, Gulnaz Kutubaeva, was a teacher on tour from Jalal-abad, Kyrgyzstan; she was quite impressed with what my students were doing, and stayed for an hour-long chat, where we were able to share in technological, educational, and cultural discourse. I have hosted education majors and student teachers from our local colleges, as well as colleagues from my own building and around the district, all of them intrigued by how to effectively synthesize technology and curriculum. If activities similar to those that I have been able to implement in my classroom can be shared with even more people throughout the Billings community, I believe that we would see a dramatic increase in support for our schools and public education.