I've been going forms-crazy

The day after our last class, Yearbook launched its teacher survey and its senior polls. We set up forms that had required names and student ID numbers, and weeded out invalid votes before counting anything. We kept the polls open till the Tuesday after Presidents' Weekend, about one week. We opened the Media Lab that Tuesday lunch and snared some procrastinating seniors.

We had about the same number of voters return ballots as we had with paper ballots (about 160 for each--more than half the senior class for their polls but about 15 pct of the entire school for the teacher polls). The big difference was in the counting. We downloaded them onto Excel spreadsheets and sorted away! In many categories, you didn't even have to count. You just could see that "Suzy Sunshine" had a way bigger swath of votes than anyone else in "Best Smile." Counting the votes took less than one hour. Each counting computer had a rapt audience which meant there was no cheating. The cleanest elections ever.

I went and used forms for my classes, too...will share more on my website. Suffice it to say, "Never forget to ask the respondents their names."

Hippocampus Religion Class Seems Too Clunky but Thinkfinity's a Winner

We're reading The Kitchen God's Wife by Amy Tan in about six weeks. We usually look at Confuciansm how it is corrupted by Neo-Confucianism. We study Neo-Confucian sayings as a clue about the attitudes towards women that are embodied in those religions in Chinese Culture. "A woman king is like a hen crowing."

I gave the Hippocampus site a look, and noticed a religion site. Chinese religions. A lecture on "Confucius Say..."--maybe we could add this to the mix. When I tried it myselt, the quality seemed amaturish. The sound quality was low--you had to strain to pick up voices that went in and out. So, I decided, not for my kids.

Hippocampus doesn't have English lessons listed yet, nor did I see any history lessons that might help with Shakespeare or WWI or the Romantics in England. So, it seems that it's not a good fit for me.

A few weeks ago, I checked out Thinkfinity by trying out lessons for a book in the planning stages, All Quiet on the Western Front. I incorporated their lesson on irony at the end of the book into my plan. Students will use a modified version of it to write their own original ironic endings. More fun than an essay about irony.