Parent Better and Change the World in 2012

 

 

On a recent journey to Costa Rica, I had the opportunity to reflect on good parenting.  Due to a brief layover, we had to switch planes mid-way and on each leg of the journey, we found ourselves sitting in front of children (yes, the same people we left our classrooms to get a break from).

I’m not (yet) a parent.  However, I believe the principles that I’ve laid out previously about classroom management apply to parenting as well.  Specifically, when you can help it, never expose children to a new situation without first letting them know what to expect from that situation and what appropriate behavior is in that situation.  Naturally, life presents unexpected situations all the time.  However, taking your students to the library, the computer lab, or a performance and taking your sons and daughters on airplanes are not unexpected events.

We teach children about individual upcoming events ahead of time for two reasons:

  1. Once we’re in a situation, it’s too late to teach the special rules (you can’t stop a performance, or halt takeoff and landing to discipline).
  2. Most importantly, misbehavior results from children being anxious.  When we explain to them what to expect they are less anxious and less likely to act up.

Classroom

In the classroom, if you’re taking your students to the library, you first discuss what’s going to happen in the library and the special rules there (use a marker to find a book, whisper when you talk, etc.).  I do not take my students to the library until I’m confident that they know how to behave there.

Rafe Esquith talks about having his students sit through the entire sound recording of a symphony in his classroom before taking the students to see the real symphony.   By listening to a CD beforehand, he taught them when to clap, how to listen, and what to listen for so they were not bored when they got there.

Living Room

At home, if you know you’re going on an airplane, into a toy store, or to the post office, you need to explain the special behaviors expected in each of those places.

How This Plays Out “In the Wild”

On the first leg of our journey, as the plane was taking off, the child screamed at the top of his lungs and yelled out, “I’m scared.”  His mom laughed.  Perhaps she didn’t care that her child was screaming—but that’s for another blog post.  He spent the flight kicking my wife’s seat.  When we landed, his mom asked him to be responsible for his own jacket and told him he had to walk.  He said no, started crying, and his grandmother ended up carrying him.

During the break, I discussed with my wife how we’re going to parent differently and then on the second leg of our journey, another family provided a perfect example.

On the final flight, another child sat down behind us with his mom.  Before the flight took off, she discussed with him the popping he’d feel soon in his ears when the flight took off.  She explained that he would need to keep his seatbelt on.  She reviewed with him what they were going to be seeing in Costa Rica.  That child was a dream to sit in front of.  Nothing was a surprise to him and he knew how to behave.

When the flight landed, another passenger asked this dream child what he was looking forward to seeing.  ”A volcano,” he said, “I want to see the lava coming out it of it.”  As a bonus, talking to your child develops language and verbal ability.  I didn’t hear the annoying kid say anything other than screams and grunts on the first flight.  It seems obvious, but talk to your child if you want them the learn to talk.

The Future

I’m worried.  I’m worried about what I see as a complete breakdown of expected behavior in public.  Mild-mannered me has been getting in fights with people at movies and plays about them texting during the show.  I’m not sure how we address a growing self-centeredness that puts one’s own needs ahead of anyone else.  However, I believe it’s those parents who are not setting behavioral expectations who are contributing to this general breakdown.  If you really don’t care about others, then I’m not sure I can help you.  However, if you want a better world, I think I’m laying out for you one way we can get there.

It’s a Hoax! Teach Critical Thinking and Analysis Through Online Hoaxes

What follows are three of my favorite hoax links, shared in a Google Workshop for Educators.  Use these to teach students that not everything posted on the internet is true.

All About Explorers
An attractive site looking site chock full of information about famous explorers, except all the information is false.

RYT Hospital
Men can now have babies, this high tech web site shows you how.

Museum of Hoaxes
Find tons more in the Museum of Hoaxes.

 

The iPad as RTI Intervention Toolkit

While waiting for the iPad to arrive in my reading intervention classroom, I’ve had a lot of time to think and plan how I will use the device.

Ground Rules

I don’t want hundreds of apps.  I’m looking for a few favorites.

I don’t want more drill and kill.  The reading intervention programs I teach do their fair share of drilling and killing (to great success) so I don’t need more of the same.

I want the iPad to help me run my intervention program like a gifted enrichment program, providing the spark that interests students in learning and helps them apply skills that they should not be learning in isolation.

My Favorites and How I Will Use Them

Dragon Dictation

While the iPhone 4S eliminates the need for Dragon Dictation because it integrates dictation whenever the keyboard appears, the iPad becomes magical with the addition of the free Dragon Dictation app.  Dragon allows students to compose their writing orally by speaking into the iPad or to type of their writing by reading it aloud.  Students can even add punctuation by speaking the name of the proper mark e.g. “Go to the store, exclamation point” will type “Go to the store!”

This is of great use for students for whom the process of writing or typing is too much of a chore to allow for the creative expression of their ideas and those whose spelling gets in the way of their completing sentences.

iMovie

Students can create movies about anything.  They can illustrate their writing, tell a personal story, present the results of their research, or create instructional videos reinforcing what you’ve been teaching them in class.

Pages

You need a word processor and Pages surely does the trick.  I consistently find it easier to use than Microsoft Word on the desktop and the iPad version works just as well with the added bonus of being able to store documents in the cloud for backup.

Storykit

This is not optimized for the iPad, it’s a phone app but it’s still incredibly simple to use to create books with images (photos or drawings) and captions.  For primary grade students, this is a great way to make books that can easily be shared, e-mailed, and printed.

Dropbox

While not instructional, I don’t know how anyone can live without Dropbox which provides Cloud storage for documents meaning anything you put there is backed up and made available on all of your computers and mobile devices.

Need more Apps?

Here are some great places to look:

Apps for all levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy by Diane Darrow

Apps to Support Literacy Instruction by Scholastic Magazine

Find and share great lists of apps with Appolicious, the social network for app sharing

iRead Program, Escondido, Kathy Shirley and friends have been at it since before the iPad and iPhone were invented, using the original iPods to increase reading fluency with English Learners.

iEAR Educational Apps Reviews from real teachers.

AppShopper.com, create a wish list of apps and receive notification when prices drop.

Have your own favorites?  Leave a comment below.

 

 

 

Creating Your First iPhone App with HTML Flowchart

I led a workshop this past weekend for Computer Using Educators:  Los Angeles on how to create your first iPhone app based on my previous post, “How to Create Your First iPhone App.”

In order to further simplify things, here is a flow chart of steps to take in order to begin the process of designing an app using HTML, here is a flow chart to illustrate the process.  Please click on the image for a larger, downloadable PDF.

Flow Chart on How to Create Your First iPhone App Using HTML

Please post any questions down below.

The True Case for Independent Work Time

For years, I’ve tried to assist teachers with setting up Independent Work Time in their classrooms.  Independent Work Time goes by many names—workshop, universal access time, centers, small-group time.  IWT is simply a time of day when teachers allow students to work independently while the teacher has a chance to meet with small groups to preteach, reteach, challenge advanced learners, and otherwise differentiate instruction.

I’ve always operated under the assumption that teachers want to set up some time during their day when they are able to meet with small groups to differentiate instruction.  However, lately it’s come to my attention that there are teachers who simply do not believe that working with small groups would improve their teaching.

In truth, I know several excellent teachers who never meet with small groups.  These teachers, however, find ways to differentiate instruction by providing different entry points into lessons for students with different needs and by doing hit-and-run style conferences with students on the go.  While they might not be providing Tier 2 interventions, their styles do create challenging environments for all learners and allow almost all students to be successful.  But I still think they’re missing something.

As someone currently working as a full-time reading intervention teacher, I certainly believe in the importance of providing students with needed interventions in the classroom before they’re pulled out to work in a program like mine.  However, these students are a minority in most classrooms.  The other travesty of not providing any independent work time is what happens for the majority of students who need a time to apply what they’ve been learning through independent exploration, writing, researching, and working with peers.

I was struck by an article, Where Will the Next Steve Jobs Come From? which argues that typical teacher-centered classrooms will not produce the kind of creative thinking that true visionaries need.  While the few super geniuses will probably succeed in spite of what their teachers do, what about the many students who have a spark inside of them they never find even while they’re learning to sit up, face forward, and listen to what their teacher says?

I don’t suggest that simply by providing Independent Work Time we will create a new Steve Jobs.  However, we teachers have five and a half hours to lead teacher directed lessons, can’t we just give students thirty minutes to explore on their own and cement their own learning?