KHS: Poetry Cafe

Cats, My Mother Has…, Flags, Keep a Poem in your Pocket, Behind the Eyes of Me, Alex, Blank, Summer, Black Cat, The P---l Family, Water, Snowboarding, Seasons, The Bells of London, Dream, Owl, Dreams, Self-Portrait, Darkest, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, Don't Trust the Fog, A Tour of the World, Crescent Moon, Leave it all on the Court, A Nightly Stroll, Paper, Life Roller Coaster, Tree, When Deaf Don Met Talkie Sue, Umbrella, and Live, Laugh, Discover.

Those were the names of the 30 poems read at the 5th annual KHS Poetry Café held in the library media center last night. It was organized and led by Aimee Anctil, LMS. Students registered in advance. Over 20 poems were written by students, and the other poems by well-known poets were selected by students to read.

The library media center was transformed into a cozy, lamp-lit, table-clothed, artsy, café environment filled with cookies, chocolate milk and other comfort foods and drinks. It was conducive to the sharing of personal, family, humorous, serious, happy, anxious, sad and foggy poetry! The standing room only crowd listened attentively to each poet's rendition of his or her poem. Café applause filled the word drenched atmosphere after each mouthing at the microphone. It was an evening to remember!

Information Literacy embodies the use of ALL kinds of information. This Poetry Café event demonstrates that writing, reading, sharing, communicating and socializing with family and the school community are all important aspects of what happens in a school library media center. The Café experience is one important part of a multi-faceted library media program at KHS.

KHS: SEVEN WEEKS OF SCRATCH

(This is a follow up to Blog Post Feb. 26th where we learned that a Scratch group was started at KHS!) -- This morning I had the incredible opportunity to observe the culminating event of a 7 week SCRATCH group of students who met one morning a week before school. Two months ago, two students came to Aimee Anctil, LMS at KHS, to talk about their recent experience at a Saturday workshop in Darien in which they learned how to program with SCRATCH. Ms. Anctil asked the students if they would like to teach her and other interested students how to use Scratch. Now, the first 7-week Scratch course is over... with plans for a second!

Today parents, siblings and future Scratch students (who plan to enroll in the SECOND Scratch series) were in the audience. The presentations were structured to put the students in the driver's seat. They showed their work and talked about creating, remixing and posting Scratch files. They showed the MIT site and talked about some of the projects that they learned from and how they downloaded and "remixed" them. The two leaders are planning their strategies for the next series of Scratch workshops, which will have new students (beginners) and repeating students (advanced). The two student teachers have divided their responsibilities to each be with one of the two groups.

The example below was created by one of the student leaders, whose Scratch name for posting on the Scratch website is Popeyeblack0.

In a rapidly changing culture, Margaret Mead pointed out that the young have to teach the old. Kids regularly learn "games" and the use of certain technologies earlier than many adults. Asking them to teach their peers and willing adults provides them an opportunity for not only learning the content at a deeper level, but also allows them to develop many other important skills, such as collaboration and communication. They are also highly motivated by the passion they have for the subject.

This morning's culminating Scratch sharing BY kids for kids and adults was a great opportunity to view how "old concepts" (independent learning, flexibility, opportunity to fail, design, collaboration, determining audience, critical thinking) are reframed in the 21st century. Great job SCRATCH kids! Great job Aimee Anctil!

... and now school stops (as does this blog) until April 20th. See you then!

KHS: 5th Grade Human Body Wiki

Tara Doyle, technology teacher, Aimee Anctil, LMS and all the KHS 5th grade teachers and students are currently pre-searching and researching human body systems. A private wiki has been created with every students name listed under their teacher's name. Each student is filling in the wiki according to the model below (click on image for larger view):

The students and teachers will use this rubric to assess the work in progress and in its final stage (click on image for large view):Project Overview:

What makes my body work?
Human Body Project

Task: Chose a human body system from the list provided and become an expert on it.

• Identify the parts of the system and explain the roles and jobs of each part.
• Explain the overall function of the system and how it helps to promoteyour body’s heath and well being.
• Create a glossary of important key words and terms relating to your research

Possible systems:

• Respiratory System
• Skeletal System & Musculature System
• Digestive System & Excretory System
• Cardiovascular System
• Nervous system

Products: Create a wiki page to host what you have learned. Use at least 3 different technologies to show your learning. Examples: Create an inspiration diagram of the parts of the system; create an Audacity MP3 file to explain the function of the system.

Possible technology applications:

• Microsoft word
• Audacity/MP3
• Inspiration
• PhotoStory
• Other…

What you will be assessed on:

• Quality of Research & Citing sources
• System Parts: Identified and explained each part of the system
• System Function: Explained the overall function of the system and how it helps your body’s heath and well being
• Quality of Synthesis (writing in your own words)
• Technology Application
• Presentation
• Glossary

Challenge:
Research what happens to the body when your chosen system fails. Explain a disease that can affect your system and how it impacts each part/organ of the system. Explain how it affects the life of the infected and describe possible treatment options for the disease. Post your synthesized research on your wiki.

KHS - SCRATCH Workshop Coming Soon!!!

Aimee Anctil, LMS at KHS, has uncovered a SCRATCH expert at her school -- a student. What is SCRATCH? Scratch was created by MIT and is a visual programming language. Users can easily create games, stories, plays, art, animations -- and they can be interactive. All of these can be shared on the web. In fact, you don't have to start from "Scratch," as you can download other people's work, and tinker with it to get it to do what you want.

According to the website "Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively."

Aimee is starting the "Scratch Club" on February 26th (before school starts) with 10 kids signed up so far...for a 7 week session!

This is a great example of the creation of a learning environment that allows kids to lead and teach others.

KHS: Bubbl.us in Action

Recently I observed Aimee Anctil, library media specialist at KHS, work with a 5th grade class to help students create graphic organizers during a pre-search process for their study of ancient Egypt using Bubbl.us. Bubbl.us is a free online mind-mapping tool. Teachers can make an account for a class (Ancient Egypt-5L, for example) with a password that can be used by all students in that class to create, store and share their bubbl.us products. (As usual when dealing with Web2.0 products, students should not use their full names and no personal information should be given.)

This is what the KHS account for one class looks like inside Bubbl.us:

(Click on image for larger view.)

Aimee described the process: "First, students completed a pre-search of 2 - 3 cultural universals that they wanted to research about ancient Egypt. After they had chosen the one with the most helpful resources, we wanted them to learn more about their cultural universal. Their job was to skim and scan a World Book Online article looking for key words that would help them expand their understanding of that cultural universal set in the context of ancient Egypt. They were encouraged to use colors and other features of the program to help organize and manage their work. We decided to use bubbl.us because not all students have access to Kidspiration or Inspiration at home, whereas bubbl.us is free and accessible to all. We posted the directions for logging in on the Assignment section of the LMC Blackboard page. Each class had their own login. We also used the recorder feature in Smart Notebook to record directions for accessing it and posted that under the login information."

Below is one example of a student's bubbl.us organization of ancient Egyptian concepts dealing with architecture.(Click on image for larger view.)

KHS: 5th grade Students Use Multiple Formats to Present their Synthesized Research

On Monday, Dec. 22nd, Kings Highway 5th grade students taught their parents and other visitors about what they learned from their research of specific topics related to their study of ancient Egypt.

Ali Moran (classroom teacher) and Aimee Anctil (library media specialist) had collaborated to work with students for 6 weeks on a Social Studies unit exploring the Cultural Universals as they appeared in ancient Egyptian culture.

Students used print and digital resources to research their chosen topics. They selected the ITL tools that they thought would best help them teach their topic to a group of visitors.

Students utilized wikis, PowerPoint, Notebook Software, and PhotoStory3 -- often connecting two or more of these products -- to engage their audience in their topics and research questions.

Many students created quizzes to assess the level of understanding of their audience members using some of the templates in the SmartBoard Activity Toolkit in Notebook Sofware. The Photostory project embedded below was created by one student to explore the arts, sports and leisure activities in ancient Egypt. This creative "commercial" was shown in segments during the ancient Egyptian sharing in the library media center.