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.

RSS -something for English teachers and a nice blog from Ohio

Jim Burke is an English teacher, formerly of Burlingame, who likes to write about teaching English. He has a matrix of skills that English students should have mastered by the time they graduate, hands-on lessons on topics such as how he organizes his notebooks, and musings. Does anyone of our group know him personally? Here's his site.

http://jimburke.typepad.com/my_weblog/

The one blog I discovered randomly is called Erin O'Brien's Owner Manuel for Human Beings. She has 786 subscribers, one of them being me. She writes about her husband "the goat" and her child "the kid" and the new Mass. senator and what it's like to go to a transvestite bar in her sad little suburb of Cleveland. Sort of like Erma Bombeck, if you remember her. I don't think I would use it in the classroom, though.

http://erin-obrien.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

Tech Challenges for Us

Bandwidth. That's the shortage at my school. We are asked to not use YouTube or other streaming because of a shortage of bandwidth. We are warned that our phones and attendance system will crash if we do it too much.

That said, I will tentatively try to use streaming and see if the sky falls down.

Anyone else?

Happy New Semester

Wow, January used to be a "mellow month." It's easier to get the classes going in the new semester, as there are fewer new names to learn, but there are other commitments--yearbook deadlines to meet, grant applications to write, and (ahem) this class.

Final thoughts on the class

I'm pleased that we can return because now we get to try things for the next month, then come back with our questions in January.

Next semester, I want to learn how to do slide shows. I want to keep working on navigation which is fundamental but tricky!! I want to wrap my mind around organizing a class of 35 teenagers and making it seem easy--group powerpoints using Google Docs??

I plan to do the yearbook senior survey using a form, and counting the 337 votes on a monster spreadsheet. It has to beat the old method.

Here's a Fun Survey!

Try this one.

spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?formkey=dFhJWFcySGJ1bGkwaFFrdHJhS3U1MEE6MA